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There is some terminology and concepts that every student wishing to get into IT should have in their vocabulary.  These are terms that probably haven’t made a school’s curriculum as of yet.  One of them is the virtual server, a concept that I have written about a number of times in this blog.  Here’s another one, Cloud Computing, a concept that has carried a great deal of steam over the past year or so.

The concept of cloud computing is designed around an architecture whose natural state is a shared pool outside the enterprise allowing users to access technology-enabled services “in the cloud”[2]  without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them[3].

The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers.  Rather than a company hosting their own email server, Google hosts the mail servers on their servers through Google mail, which has gone after the business market lately. 

The company gets to employ their own domainname, but don’t have to worry about supporting their email.  Google boasts that one of the big advantages of using their cloud computing service for email is that because Google mail deals hundreds of millions of emails every day, (by the way, it is estimated that around 183 billion emails are sent each day worldwide) that they can respond to new viruses faster due to the sheer volume of emails they have to analyze versus an organization that hosts their own email server and may only deal with a few thousand emails a day.

Cloud computing is proving very popular for application vendors whose applications are server based.  Rather than using up a server for another application, organizations are demanding that the vendor host the application and allow them to access it over the Internet.

The primary concerns over Cloud Computing are security and redundancy.  How do you know for certain if your cloud computing provider is backing up your files?  How do you know that their internal security is as good as yours?  How do you know if their datacenter has a backup Internet pipeline and power generator?  These are issues that must be addressed before a sizeable number of organizations’ critical IT functions such as email will utilize cloud computing.

Brad Rudisail
Computer Network Technician-Network Security Instructor
Ashworth University

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