As we stand in 2022, there is not a day that goes by where we do not use cloud computing. High school and college students alike are using things such as Google Drive or OneDrive to house their assignments and research papers. Business owners are sending emails via the cloud, gamers are storing and playing games with each other because of the cloud, even the laptop/desktop/smart phone you are using to read this blog post has it's data backed up in the cloud. See, the cloud is a part of our everyday lives, but not everyone fully understands it and how it came to be.
Let me first preface this by saying that the cloud is not, well, an actual cloud. That may seem obvious, but you would be surprised to find out a lot of people do happen to think that way. The cloud instead is an actual computer, more so a collection of computers. Big tech companies such as Google and Microsoft use a portion of their earnings to fund the building of what are called data centers, places where they can house and manage these many computers. As a quick example to see how this works, imagine you are using Google Docs to write a paper for class. When you exit out of Google Docs, the paper is not stored on your hard drive, but in the cloud instead. What this means is that a copy of your file is created and saved onto one of the many computers in one of Google's many data centers.
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Cloud computing was first conceptualized way back in the 1960's when J.C.R. Licklider had an idea about an interconnected network of computers all working together. Similarly in the year 1960, a man by the name of John McCarthy had made a prediction that in the near future computational tasks would be carried out through public utilities. In simpler terms, he predicted that computing would be sold as a utility because it will be so common. He was absolutely right, as now we have things like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), in which we pay a small price in exchange for complex computational functions, such as database management and data encryption.
Since the idea from Licklider and the prediction from McCarthy, it had taken a while for cloud computing to actually be implemented. It was not until the mid 2000's that companies like AWS and Microsoft started to implement cloud computing. This is because it is not cheap to manage, as the data centers are all very costly operations to be run in their own right.
Today we are surrounded by cloud computing, as mentioned earlier, and we have gotten more steadily over the years. 2010 gave us Azure from Microsoft, 2011 gave us the Open Compute Project from Facebook which was ran through the cloud, I could go on and on. But the question still remains, how did cloud computing change the world?
The answer to this question lies in the foundations of business. For one, cloud computing has lowered costs for businesses worldwide, due to the fact that the cloud services cover the costs of infrastructure, upgrades, new hardware, you name it. The cloud has also increased flexibility by a ton, meaning that business can spread their focuses from branch to branch, so one can manage the needs of IT and one can manage the needs of customers. It also allows for better security for your business, as it would be a professional being the one encrypting your data, which is imperative for any business. Finally, it makes communication so much easier and more convenient. With cloud computing, multiple people can work within the same file(s), resulting in work getting done in a much more efficient manner.
All in all, cloud computing has been one of the greatest innovations as of late. From easier communication to stronger security, it's benefits seemingly never end, and it's downsides seemingly never appear at all.
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