Comwerks Interactive

Cloud Computing — Boon or Bane

Posted by Krish Sreedharan in Technology on August 28th, 2008

Google has in many ways, revolutionized the way most people look at the Internet. One of them is Google Applications, which allows “simple” documents such otherwise known as “Word” Documents and “Excel” Spreadsheets and “PowerPoint” presentations to be created, edited, stored and shared online — in the Internet “Cloud” so to speak. So what exactly is this “Cloud” all about ?

 

The Cloud has been the ubiquitous symbol of the Internet in Network Diagrams from the beginning. One of the possible reasons that the Internet is referred to as the “Cloud” is because like a real cloud, it has connections to pretty much everywhere … and it transfers information to and from various hosts connected to it either directly and/or indirectly. 

 

Typically, Cloud Computing would refer to the available computing power/storage which is not on the same physical network, but which is available for use online and is accessible from any place with a reasonably fast internet connection — reasonably fast since one needs to work at an acceptable pace. However, the emphasis of cloud computing is really not blazing speed. Its more about flexibility, adaptability and availability. How about accessibility, one might ask. That would depend on how good or bad the connectivity to the Internet is from that particular point of access.

 

Let me try to put this forth from a layman’s point of view. I create a document, which I intend to share with a few people. To do this, I would have to either copy the document onto some physical media — say a CD or a USB Dongle, or, I would have to email it across to the people with whom I want the document to be shared. But that’s not the end. Each of the readers is bound to put in his/her thoughts and also comment upon what’s already there. And this has to be shared among the rest as well … so pretty soon, it reaches a stage where there are multiple versions of the document and realistically, nobody knows which is the latest version. The bottom line is that was was meant to be a systematic creation of a document that incorporates the views of multiple creators, soon becomes a directionless tangle of ideas.

 

So, let’s try this the “Cloud Computing” way, using Google Apps as our tool of choice — the author creates the document, and he “shares” it with others who would be collaborating with him on this document. While sharing, he defines the access rights of each of the collaborators, whether they are allowed just to view or whether they are allowed to edit the contents of the document. As such there is only one copy of the document that is shared among the various collaborators and each one gets to see all the edits made by all the other collaborators in real time. In addition, if two or more collaborators are editing the same document, their edits are also visible to each other in near real time. The best part of the deal is that these users work from a Web Browser, which is available in pretty much every computer. They need not jump through hoops to install any special software to get this working.

 

So far, I have been going on about what is Cloud Computing and its time I got down to the crux of this blog post — it is a Boon or is it going to create more problems than it is going to solve. Let’s look at the pros and cons:

The Pros -

• It would allow seamless collaboration and also tighter control of the versions and the number of copies of a single document
• It saves a fair amount of licensing costs to the end-user (in terms of the requirements that the user would have to have licensed copies of all software required to create the document on his/her computer)
• It reduces the infrastructure cost (even a simple PC can be used to access the internet and create documents on the cloud)
• From an organizational perspective, it reduces the investment in High Performance Hardware which would otherwise be required to get the same job done within the organization
• For the mobile worker, it would allow creation/modification/sharing of working documents irrespective of location and hardware platform — access is possible from Desktops, Laptops, Palmtops, Mobile Phones and across multiple operating systems

The Cons -

• Accessibility, while normally taken for granted, can depend to a great extent, on the available connectivity at the point of access
• Creating/Storing/Sharing documents on a third party server hosted on the Internet may run foul of organizational policies related to storage of sensitive/critical information
• Use of weak passwords for access to such “hosted” application could compromise the integrity of the overall system
• System Upgrades, when they go wrong, can cut off access to such Cloud Computing Resources

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