2008 June | Finbarr McCarthy

Increasingly companies are realising the vast potential cloud computing has to offer. Like many others the New York Times has recently created a new website which gives users a fully searchable archive of all the articles it published between 1851 and 1922, that’s about 13 million articles.

More impressively, it has done this without installing any new servers or bandwidth.

How did they do this? Simple! They used Amazons cloud computing service offering.

Cloud computing is one of the most promising new uses of technology we have seen in a long time. Just a few years ago if you wanted to do something on the web, you needed to go out and buy servers, software, etc - get it all connected to the internet and then start worrying about your project.

With the advent of Web 2.0 and the usage of “The Network as a Platform” this has all changed. Cloud computing has the nice advantage of having software, hardware and bandwidth as a pay as you go service.

Many organisations are now looking at cloud computing and realising that it makes a lot of sense, instead of having to dedicate precious resources keeping their own data centres running they can opt to pay someone like Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Dell a modest fee to worry about keeping all the hardware, infrastructure and software running 24/7 for them.

It probably works out a lot greener and less expensive too. Traditionally companies scaled their data centers and bandwidth to deal with their busiest periods. This often meant way over specified connections and processing power that was well under utilised 95% or more of the time. As we all know, servers running waiting for someone to use them cost us all a lot in terms of money and carbon footprint.

Google has been a big proponent of this technology, providing services like GMail, and it Google Apps which provide email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets and storage to any web connect device - no software required.

Since Google launched it enterprise apps in early 2007 it has already in excess of half a million subscribers using the service. Microsoft has just followed suit launching “Office Live” and Microsoft On-Line.

These are excellent tools for individuals and small businesses who don’t want to invest in all the software, servers and data centers typically required to run simple tasks like email and word processing.

But what about larger enterprises? It is true that there is some resistance to implementing these services, however, take Coca Cola for example; It has recently signed a deal with Microsoft that will effectively move all it email and documents off its own network and onto Microsoft Live.

There are some concerns about security and data sensitivity, after all if you embrace cloud computing you do need to trust the company providing you with this service and ultimately that is going to be an individual call for each company.

Trust me, this is one of the biggest developments since the sliced pan.

www.amazon.com/aws

www.google.com/apps

http://www.officelive.com/

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