Before understanding cloud, we need to understand the history and how data is to manage earlier days like in 1960’s? The answer is Mainframes.

Mainframes are large and high computing platform. These systems will be managed in a separate large room or hall with all necessary power backup, cooling and data backup maintenance. This is a huge investment to the company. So, not every company can effort this system.

After some days, a group of companies in particular area contributed themselves by investing some part of amount and setup mainframe systems on a large platform and keep sharing the compute power among them to reduce the cost of system and maintenance on each and this platform we called as Datacenter.

Later some third party companies started investing on these datacenters and selling the space for each company to setup their hardware such that this third party company is responsible of maintaining by providing enough power backup and maintaining the systems in cooling conditions as these are too costly if each company want to keep on their premises.

In 1970, 80’s new less expensive and compact hardware components got invented. With this every company started investing to buy own hardware and maintaining it themselves, this way datacenters popularity got down. With the introduction of client/server architecture companies started purchasing inexpensive systems which will serve the same as much as traditional mainframes system.

In 1990’s with the popularity of the internet, companies started maintaining the systems at each remote offices and acting as head offices and getting synced to head office (not regular as internet speed is not much great as of today). But this is too expensive for the company. Here now the systems got De-Centralized.

Since 2000, the internet power got increased due to high-speed broadband. With this, companies again replacing remote computing systems and with web services. As using web services, we can directly interact with head office and get enough information and no need to maintain any data at remote offices as we can keep pushing the data to the head office server. This way we increase the security of the data and availability of data at every remote office. Again here systems got Centralized.

As Again we are in same cycle were maintaining all the remote offices data at single head office server is too risk as we need to provide good power backup, data backup and also enough hardware to accomplish it. Now, Cloud is the solution where instead of maintaining datacenter at one place it will be maintained and replicated across the geographically such that the nearest datacenter will serve the information. With this

  • Faster response of data
  • Redundant data will secure our data and be always available if in case of any datacenter got shutdown.

 

Will dig in to more in-detail how Cloud Computing is more advantage to an individual/organization and what are those in my next upcoming article.

 

Happy Learning 🙂