Well, it is not new!
Ethernet was created in 1973 by a team at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in California. The team, led by American electrical engineer Robert Metcalfe, sought to create a technology that could connect many computers over long distances.
It was demonstrated in 1982 that with Xerox Star computer system accessing files in Los Angeles, California while sitting in PARC California; edit, save, and print remotely.
Metcalfe later forged an alliance between Xerox, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Intel Corporation, creating a 10-megabit-per-second (Mbps) standard, which was ratified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In 1979 Metcalfe created 3Com Corporation to commercialize Ethernet. 3Com started by building Ethernet circuit boards for minicomputers before releasing an Ethernet card (plug-in circuit board) for the IBM personal computer (PC) in 1982. This gave PCs the efficiency, convenience, and power of computer networks. The true potential of Ethernet was unleashed in 1990 with the creation of the World Wide Web by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. It was the beginning on Cloud Computing.
Which “cloud” should you be on?
The term cloud is mentioned quite often in modern society…. Ever wondered about its such deep ingraining mechanism of working into the very fabric of our daily living.
Be it Gmail or instant data backup of thousands of selfies, videos into the cloud by mostly Google, Microsoft & Amazon Web Services (AWS).
So, what is cloud computing really all about … Straightforwardly, pay as we go services which provides on-demand access to virtualized IT resources like networks, servers, storage, applications & services
It is a killer concept which is being an access-based technology unlike an owned one & simply pay for what we use, when we use it, on an hourly or weekly basis.
Still at an early stage of adoption, despite the long history of mainframes renting decades back, then to affordable PCs and now again renting by cloud services providers (CSP) for large volumes of data processing & storage.
It sounds easy & affordable because hassles of security, regulations, uptime, IT staff costs etc. are handled by a service provider and the top benefit is that one can avoid huge capital cost & troubles of owning & maintaining an IT set up or data centers.
Difficult times of COVID-19 taught most of us to do self-discovery. Organizations switched to work from home (WFH) to ensure business continuity for now & later. Simultaneously, enormous data eruption on social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp etc. coupled with home-education in academia (online education) and over-the-top media services (OTT) like Netflix pushed data consumption to unprecedented levels besides loads of volumes from other business systems.
There are three types of cloud service models-
1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
3. Software as a Service (SaaS)
Research firm IDC says building IT Infrastructure to support cloud computing shall form more than 1/3rd of all IT spending worldwide. For sure, Cloud computing entails immense convenience & infinite possibilities to companies of all sizes to transform their businesses through smart adoption of Cloud services. Cloud computing frees up budgets & resources by outsourcing & automating monotonous, recurring jobs & maintaining focus on core business to stay competitive.
Generally, Costs around Licenses & ramping back up storage, Tools like email systems, communication & collaborative agents, Disaster Recovery etc., using Cloud is often a wise move.
As computing workloads continually move to cloud, Checklist must include security, risks, policies & controls in line with company culture. Vendor lock-ins, non-relevant shift of business processes such as supply chain management, Research platforms, Financial planning etc. may not yield measurable efficiency without applying due diligence on risks & ROI on the intended move by the cloud joiner.
Functional competence & Geographical footprint will be key as popular providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) & Microsoft along with Facebook, IBM & Oracle etc. which are positively heating up the competition, one may expect services to become richer in features at lower prices. Corporates must know different strengths & priorities of service providers. Broadly seen, AWS is particularly strong in IaaS & PaaS but has designs on moving up towards databases. Microsoft in contrast has a particular emphasis on SaaS thanks to Office 365 and its other software largely aimed at end user productivity but it is also trying to rapidly grow its IaaS and PaaS offering through Azure. GCP seem to be PaaS & SaaS strong. Others like IBM & Oracle’s cloud businesses are more of IaaS & PaaS based offerings. So prospective cloud adopters need to mix & match cloud services into solutions that benefits their core needs & services as businesses sure need alignment & customization.
Remember, Life is full of choices & Enterprises should leverage best practices to balance between Costs & capabilities for a purpose-built cloud journey……
Pinnacle Business Information Modernization Office is a divisional center of expertise who are equipped to assess the current situation at your organization big or small and design a cloud transformation journey.
Pinnacle® is a multi-country consultancy firm. Our consultants are spread around the world; with 70% of our consultants are women. We have built our organization on modern business model with agility, diversity, and resilience to the business dynamics. We have chosen our technology platform to support our modern mindset thus we work from anywhere …. As work is not a place anymore. We implement Lean Six Sigma in everything we do whether internally or externally at our client sites.
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