Unraveling the Cloud

As you no doubt have heard, cloud technology is completely changing the industry as we know it. Cloud computing and cloud hosting is the new future and eventually all businesses will have to shift towards this new technology in order to keep up with the new generation of doing business more easily and cost effectively.

Image by Rocío Lara via Flickr

First off, cloud computing is a new ideology and technology that provides computing power for businesses. The effect of this is that companies no longer need to buy expensive hardware to do the computing that they need to run their business. What this especially means for data analysis companies (for example) is that they don’t need to run and build and maintain large expensive server farms anymore. While cloud computing may not sound incredibly useful to a wide range of companies who don’t actually need to do a lot of computer or server computation, cloud storage, which is also a feature of the new ideology of “going cloud” is more useful to all companies. All companies will invariably need to store computer data somewhere. For most companies before the “cloud” generation, this meant storing information on very small private business servers or on their hard drives.

There are two major problems with this that cloud storage solves immediately and efficiently. The first problem is that back-up not only becomes a nuisance, it is also very unsafe. There are a multitude of problems with storing important, sensitive business data in privately-owned servers or hard drives. Hard drives on computers especially are known for failing without warning and without a chance to recover the data that was once on them. Cloud storage basically takes any data and spreads it across many servers and also backs it up among many servers so the problem of losing data is virtually non-existent. If a server in these cloud server farms fails, which they are easily prone to, then there is already a back-up somewhere else so that data can be easily retrieved regardless.

Virtual servers, also known as the term virtual private server (VPS) is a term popular in internet hosting services. It basically refers to a virtual machine (virtual because it is still running on the same physical computer as the user’s) but it it special in the sense that while on the same physical computer, it acts as if it was on a different physical computer and it is not effected by what happens on the user’s computer and thus the user’s computer’s frailty becomes a non-issue. There is also the benefit that it can be easily and specifically tailored to the user’s needs and also has the privacy that comes with having a completely separate physical computer different from the current one of the user’s.

Virtualization is especially nice because it allows for the businesses to run different versions of software (the popular choice is operating system) to use on the same server as the equivalent applications already on the server but having a different version of the software. This issue of different versions of software causing issues in businesses was a very big and annoying issue that practically yelled for the creation and widespread use of virtualization in businesses to consolidate the incompatibilities of different versions of software.

Finally, virtualization also results in reducing hardware costs for the business (as is certainly true with cloud technology) and also power expenses since these businesses no longer need to purchase completely separate boxes for the use of running different versions of applications.

This post was written by

Victor – who has written 1 posts on Tech Genial.

Victor Daily is a blogger interested in technology and social media. Besides writing about latest news in these areas he has experience with cloud computing and cloud storage.

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Tagged as: Business, Cloud computing, Cloud storage, Servers