If you’ve been following the development of new technology at the moment and the new implementation of various techniques and devices then you will likely be up to your neck in new terms and ideas – now is a very good time to be interested in technology and it continues to improve at an exponential rate.
One of the subjects that you might have heard of is ‘the cloud’ and this is something that is becoming a big buzz word – affecting many of our current services such as cloud hosting and having many more larger implications for the future.
If you don’t know what the cloud is, then it essentially refers to cyberspace and to the servers. The servers are those large storage computers that house all of the data that we get from the net – when we browse online our computer essentially contacts those servers and asks them for data and this means that we get to see it without having to store it on our own computers. In other words that data is on ‘the cloud’. This is why applications on iPhone and Android phones are so great – because they can be downloaded very quickly from the server using a very simple interface it means that technically we have constant access to those apps without them needing to be stored on our computer – again we are keeping them on the cloud.
Cloud hosting is something that is already in effect too and that affects the way we do business. Cloud hosting essentially means that the servers themselves can send and receive your files so that they don’t need to be permanently in one place. This is very useful for a number of reasons. First of all it is useful because it means you have nearly infinite storage – as your files are limited not only to one server but can be spread across many. At the same time this means that your files will not get destroyed and your site won’t go down. If someone needs to make changes to your server and you are using cloud hosting then the files will simply be transferred to a different server while the other one is repaired. At the same time if your files are deleted they will still exist on the ‘cloud’ of other servers. Even if there were to be a fire and the servers were burned down, in many cases this wouldn’t lose your files as the cloud hosting would have multiple facilities.
Already then ‘the cloud’ is making big changes to the way we use and access data and making our devices and our hosting more powerful. However at the moment it is limited by the cost and the speed of internet connections which mean that we can’t use them constantly. However in the future it might be that the programmes on our phones don’t even need to be downloaded, but that they can be run remotely from the cloud. This way our phones would have the processing power and the storage of the server or a computer – not the phone’s hardware – and that would mean a tiny device could display the graphics of the largest. Eventually devices might even share their processing power and a storage in order to create a vast network of processing power that had unprecedented computation capabilities.
Luke Brayden