Well, I guess BBC weather is kinda hard to navigate but I don’t I really need you to explain it to me…
Okay, really, if you’re going to start all this rubbish again I’m not even going to both-
Wait, wait, wait! I got it, you’re talking about that bit in Gulliver’s Travels, right? The floating island place full of mathmos?
Points for effort, but really this is just tedious now, and it’s only week two. Do you want to hear about this one or not?
Meh. You’ve got fifteen seconds to convince me, go.
Okay, well, imagine never needing to buy a new computer ever again. Imagine a tiny box sitting on your desk; just a keyboard, a screen and an internet connection. Now imagine this new slim-line laptop has near unlimited hard-drive space plus processing power that approaches super-computer status. That’s the power of cloud computing.
That sounds as realistic as an advertisement selling me toothpaste so good it’ll cook me breakfast. I like it.
Well, I confess, the set-up I just described is a somewhat rose-tinted view, but the reality is really not that far off. The idea behind cloud computing is basically that instead of having your computer lug around all the hardware it needs to store and process information it will simply connect to an online server (the ‘cloud’) which manages these things for you. Without having to worry about hardware problems the computer you use will be smaller, cheaper, and never need to be updated – instead, you just pay for access to the ‘cloud’.
So it’s computing power that comes down the pipes?
Exactly. Cloud computing turns the whole computer market into another utility, like water or electricity. This makes it perfect for emerging companies or business that need scalable computing power but can’t afford to pay for the initial infrastructure costs. Companies like Twitter have already found that it’s cheaper to pay for bandwidth and storage from distant hosting companies than buy their own servers. For academic institutions the cloud can be even more beneficial – two CERN physicists have already set up a project known as ‘the Grid’, a European-wide network that pools the computing power of nineteen universities to process data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.
But do I really need any of this stuff just to look at pictures of cats on the internet?
This is the problem. Cloud computing is fantastic for those who will actually use it to its full potential, but for the average guy or gal behind a keyboard it won’t ever be worth it. The computing power already available to consumers far exceeds the needs of the average user and is much cheaper than cloud computing when bought in the small quantities most of us need. Cloud computing could even end up leaving the public worse off – if computing power becomes a utility then you can be certain that those who provide it will do all they can to maximize their profit. And this is before we even consider the privacy issues of no longer physically owning any of your data.
This all sounds like a horrible mistake now. But tell me; does this cloud have a silver lining?
That was terrible. But yes, as it happens, there’s still a lot of good news. Although cloud computing as a utility might have some unwanted side effects, the basic principle of relocating storage or processing power from your computer has already been put to some fantastic uses. Services like Spotify or Grooveshark provide hundreds of thousands of tracks direct to your computer; there’s Onlive, a games-console the size of a paperback book that can stream Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 titles direct to your TV; and Google have even announced their own operating system, Chrome OS, which will run entirely within an internet browser. Whether it’s being used by universities borrowing processing power to map genomes for cancer research, or by teenagers shouting abuse at each other whilst playing video games online, cloud computing is certainly here to stay.
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