The other day I was sitting in a Starbucks in St. Catharines, Ontario with a friend. He was asking me about FORscene technology. I had my laptop with me (I’m a PC) and because it was easier to show him, I did. We were both sitting there accessing and editing video that was not on my computer. It was being accessed over the internet, using what has come to be known as “Cloud Computing”. Now, I am not an IT kind of person and neither is he. We both have spent most of our careers in the Broadcast industry and a good portion of that in edit bays or edit suites. The sheer enormity of the concept of being able to edit and collaborate anywhere, anytime hit me smack in the face.

Cloud technology…what the heck are you talking about? I asked my “go to” IT type twitter buddy if he could explain it so even I could understand. Peter Giblet CEO of P3 Social Media  put it very succinctly, “Use LinkedIn, Facebook? Then you already use cloud computing. Every business application can have its data on the web instead of having it stored on a corporate server.”

Eric Knorr, Editor in Chief and Galen Gruman, Executive Editor for Features and News, of Info World say, “Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.”

Dave Cleveland, Sr. Director, of wikinvest “Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth”

Jonathan Strickland of http://www.howstuffworks.com/ “Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you’d only have to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It’s called cloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry.”

Macmillan Dictionary defines it as follows “cloud computing is based on the idea that, rather than each company or individual being set up with their own computing devices for data storage and manipulation, computing resources can be pooled and shared via the Internet. The goal of cloud computing is therefore a shared IT infrastructure providing easy access to (powerful) computer resources which are geared towards users’ needs – they can be expanded or scaled down as the user requires.”
Fred Blauer for CA magazine considers cloud computing and SaaS to be one and the same “There has been a lot of press on the new Web 2.0 or cloud computing type of applications also known as software as a service (SaaS). This type of cloud computing delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting.”

You could always just look up the actual definition on Wikipedia.

So basically, cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet.

One thing they all talk about is that these cloud computing services are pretty much divided into three broad categories: IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS – Platform as a Service and SaaS – Software as a Service. I think I will leave those for another day.

What I will leave you with is Cloud Computing In Plain English by Common Craft  A 3 minute video that seriously demonstrates it in plain English. As for me, I think that it is like many things in life, you can’t see them, but you know they are there. You just have to have a little faith.

Talk soon,
M