Cloudy visions of the future
Written by Shiv Prasad on 2:00 AM
The change is described in Nick Carr's new book The Big Switch, where he argues that computing power is becoming a utility.
He believes that instead of owning our own processors we will soon be renting time on large systems run by the likes of Google and Amazon, not just for storing data but also for running code.
Carr sees strong parallels between the way electricity generation shifted from local generators in factories to a national grid providing voltage differences where they are needed and the move from local to central processing.
In the world Carr describes most processing takes place in "the cloud", and the computers we actually use will manage the interface and the communications, but do little of the real work.
It is a compelling vision, though not without its problems.
Computing is not a simple service like electricity, and it's not clear that we can solve the administrative problems needed to have business-critical services hosted remotely.
Moving everything onto the network may appeal in the rich countries of the industrialised world but offers little to rural India or sub-Saharan African countries.
And there are massive security and data management issues to be solved.
Even so, the potential benefits are too great to be ignored, and we're likely to see a range of services go live next year that will, if successful, take us closer to the cloud computing model.
It will not be an overnight shift, but when we look back in a decade or so I think we'll see 2008 as the year things started to changeLatest Seo Services & Latset Seo Tips By Seo Support
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