The massive juggernaut (or should I say storm) that is cloud computing / Cloud Hosting rolls on and on and on, 2011 is really looking like the year that cloud computing turns into something for everybody.
Intel Invests in cloud Hosting Research
In fact the very news that Intel has decided to invest $100 million in collaboration with Stanford University into cloud computing research is not short of extremely exciting.
The company plans to develop and open several branded “Intel Science and Technology Centers” at a number of universities for sponsored research and innovation throughout 2011.
HP steps up its activity
Combine this with the fact that industry executive Emil Sayegh has moved to HP to help it sell to the cloud computing sector. Sayegh was previously general manager of the Rackspace Cloud, where he was among the evangelists for the company’s vision for cloud platforms as a transformative force in the hosting industry. One can see the inertia really building behind this form of data storage / handling. As it mentioned before the US military has moved a significant amount of facility into the cloud.
Finally the drum that has been banged for so long by the forward thinkers in this industry has been heard by the corporate customer base out there.
Was the general consumer first?
Perhaps this could be seen as the one time that the smaller consumer was actually ahead of the larger blue chip corporate. Since so many people have got used to using facilities like Dropbox and A-drive to keep their documents and Flickr to keep their photographs in the cloud.
As well as playing browser based online multiplayer games, things like second life and of course Facebook what this means is a serious amount of smaller consumers have been using what you could call cloud computing for much longer than the larger operators out there.
Go back five years and how easy would it have been to convince someone like Lufthansa or American Airlines to take up Cloud servers and not to own large server farms with their own security and technical staff, these days I suspect a certain amount of this is now kept on a cloud style basis.
Obviously there are concerns about speed, and financial/ stock market trading companies are willing to pay more for those few extra many seconds.
These days though it really isn’t an issue for more conventional organizations.
Is its Greener?
A company in Iceland is promoting itself as a green server alternative simply because the connection between here in the UK is so very fast. The idea is because it is so cold for most of the year that they don’t need to have the air conditioning on constantly as quite literally they can just open the windows.
That should really please the green lobby…
Actually simply because having a central location, or in fact more central locations where many different companies and organizations keep their system means a lot less electricity used and greenhouse gasses produced. This means it is a win-win all-round.
The concerns about security have more or less gone away and the argument from a financial point of view is extremely strong (as we have documented before).
all in all I wonder why it has taken so long…