The Cloud

A recent conversation reminded me about my recent exposure to the Cloud, a word which has been banded around a good deal recently. It's been used regarding new technologies and is the latest bandwagon to jump on, but try to determine what the cloud is and the focus is on the technology, partly because anyone with any interest in the subject is a technologist of some kind. This is missing the point.

The Cloud does have a technological angle but the main aspect is a commercial one. It allows companies to scale their web applications easier and more economically than in the past, allowing small companies to compete with much larger companies with greater resources.

For example, a three-man company, consisting of a business analyst, web developer and a QA specialist, develop a treasury web application. To deploy the application such that one customer can use it requires that either the customer hosts the application, the company does, or an ISP or other third party does. The first requires that the customer buys the relevant hardware/software and is responsible for maintaining it. The second requires that the development company do the same. The problem with the third option is that, previously, the inflexability and cost is was prohibative, especially if the application is complex and as the number of customers increases. It's this third aspect that the Cloud, and it's technologies, have changed. By making available complex and powerful resourses, and making them scalable at an incremental cost, the small company can provide the services that the large company, with it's own dedicated servers, can. Added to this is the fact that smaller companies have much better operating costs than large ones.