Cloud Computing Goes Mainstream

I'm sure you have all seen the latest set of Microsoft Windows 7 "to the cloud" advertisements...but what does it actually mean?

"Cloud Computing" has been around for many years but is only now starting to become something for the "everyday" user. The definition of cloud computing is a very broad one ranging from remote storage to remote processing. Windows 7 has options for the remote storage cloud, allowing users to store all of their documents, images, videos etc in the cloud, making them accessible from any Windows 7 machine in the world.

Googles soon to be launched operating system, ChromeOS takes this one step further and stores not only documents, but user settings and user applications in the cloud. This means that a user can get exactly the same experience on any ChromeOS machine they log onto. This has the added advantage of being a disaster solution "in the box", if your laptop is destroyed at any point then nothing is lost, just get another one, log in and you are back to exactly where you left off.

The other end of the spectrum in the form of remote processing takes all computational needs away from the local machine, which basically becomes a display device for the cloud....essentially virtualisation. At the moment this type of cloud computing is only really done by companies that require it, comapanies such as Animation Studios or Visual Effects Houses that use the cloud as a rendering power house, saving the company hundereds of thousands of pounds in server hardware.

In the future however this type of computing may be available to the "everyday" user as a service like their gas or electricity. Users that want the high performance of a top end machine without the astronomical hardware costs. Someone that would like a high performance machine to edit large photos in Photoshop could buy the time on cloud to do such a thing, saving money on hardware and the Photoshop software, spending money only on the time they use.

Although we can see the advantages of cloud computing, at the moment the main bottleneck is the internet connection throughout the country. With some people not yet on broadband and thousands of others with below-par speeds, putting some much emphasis on a technology that requires a reliable, fast connection is probably not a good idea for most. In the future however, after the network infrastructure has been improved, then cloud computing could become the norm and we will forget what life was like without it.