By: Renat Zarbailov
Cloud computing is going to change the way you store, use, and share information. For a traveling professional like myself this approach is god-sent since I no longer have to carry thumb-drives to use the content on many different computers. Essentially the term cloud computting is a simple way to descrive SAS (software as a service). An example of a service like that is Google Docs. Simple, straightforward way to keep your documents accessible from any computer in the world connected to the internet. Another example is picnik (picnik.com), or photoshop.com. These two services provide online image editing that is simple to use, giving the user ability to store the edited and raw images files on the server. Furthermore, this way is more secure and affordable than that of the thumb-drive one since the access to your information is protected via user name and password. Plus, you will never have to buy another thumb-drive with more capacity or be afraid of loosing it. Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used under-the-hood, or how it’s managed. The term cloud computing probably comes from (at least partly) the use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or some large networked environment. We don’t care much what’s in the cloud or what goes on there except that we depend on reliably sending data to and receiving data from it. Cloud computing has become the new buzz word, born sometime in mid 2007, and driven largely by marketing and service offerings from big corporate players like Google, IBM and Amazon.