I have a confession, I don’t use Twitter of Facebook. Maybe it seems incongruous that, as Chairman of the BCS Internet Specialist Group, I ought to be seen setting an example and embracing these technologies.
My concern these days is that much of the Internet-based technologies are being used, just because they are there. You can also be sure that what might seem the latest fad, something else will come along and replace it. Google didn’t exist in the early days of the Web, we used search tools such as Alta Vista or Yahoo.
The history of computing is littered with hundreds of examples of how quickly things change. My first program sits proudly on a shelf above my desk; it’s a set of punched cards from a Fortran system which ran on an ICL mainframe in the heady seventies . It read in two numbers an printed them out in the reverse order., The excitement of it all, my first attempt to use a computer obeying my instructions, even if I had to wait for hours for the results to be given to me by the operations department.
What is it? The “Cloud” for computing is not just the preserve of the big boys and girls, it is especially suited to the smaller enterprise. Much like the way in which utilities are used such as gas, electric and phone, so too, can computing be considered in a similar vein.
So what exactly is the cloud? In the world of IT we have a great tendency to not only create new technology but often re-invent existing ones. The cloud tends to fall into the latter of these two. A far better description than something as vague as using the word Cloud is perhaps “hosted” or “off-site” or “online”.
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