Last updated on November 16th, 2023 at 02:15 pm
You may have heard of cloud computing and are wondering just exactly what it is. The term has been in use since the early 2000s, but the concept of cloud computing as a service has been around for much, much longer, beginning as far back as the 1960s when companies rented time on a computer bureau’s mainframe rather than having to purchase a computer themselves- no small thing given that computers that could sit on your desktop now took up whole buildings! These ‘time-sharing’ services were made obsolete by the emergence of the PC, which made owning your own computer a much more affordable option for businesses as well as individuals.
Despite the PC’s popularity, the concept of renting access to computing power still played an important role in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the form of application service providers, utility computing, and grid computing. This was followed by cloud computing, which meant a company no longer needed expensive in-house computer systems. A great example of this is MYOB advanced software, a cloud business management system that gathers data like inventory reports from across a company’s entire operation, keeps it all organized, automates basic functions, and saves a lot of time and money! The cloud is what makes all this possible, so let’s fly up there and take a closer look!
To put it in simple terms, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services that include databases, servers, networking, storage, intelligence, software, and analytics across the Internet, which is called ‘the cloud’ for these purposes. The cloud system provides economies of scale, faster innovation, and flexible resources. In general, your company only pays for the exact cloud services it uses, which helps to decrease operating costs, scale as your business requires change, and run infrastructure more efficiently.
Cloud computing comprises a seismic shift away from the traditional methods businesses have used in regards to their IT resources. Here are some more of the benefits cloud computing has to offer:
Speed – Cloud computing provides self-service on demand. This allows large amounts of computing resources to be accessed in minutes with just a few mouse clicks, providing businesses with a great deal of flexibility and removing the pressure from capacity planning.
Performance – Cloud computing services operate across a worldwide network of secure data centres that are upgraded regularly to the latest generation of efficient, fast, and reliable computing hardware. This offers a variety of advantages over maintaining a single corporate data centre, including greater economies of scale and reduced application network latency.
Reliability – Cloud computing simplifies disaster recovery, business continuity, and data backup, making these processes easier, more secure, and less expensive due to the fact that the data can be mirrored on multiple redundant sites over the cloud provider’s network.
Cloud computing is here to stay, even Australian government offices are now implementing it! So, the next time you look up at the clouds, say hi to your data, it loves it up there!
Aimee Garcia is a Marketing Consultant and Technical Writer at DailyTechTime. She has 5+ years of experience in Digital Marketing. She has worked with different IT companies.