The Cloud...

Tags: Cloud, Network

It seems like everyone and their dog is talking about The Cloud these days. For many, it appears to be some magical concept that will revolutionize the way we use computers, tablets and mobile phones. Everyone is in awe about something, but few people can actually describe what that cloud thing really is...

 Little Green Men

In reality, there really isn't much new under the sun. The cloud is named after one of the icons network administrators used in their diagrams. This icon represented 'the Internet' or another network that really did not belong to the internal company network and of which not much was known. It wasn't necessary to define this network to ensure proper operation so therefor it was omitted from the detailed description of the rest of the network. 

Network diagram

We can even go back further to the very first networks (long before the Internet) that were in operation at research facilities, universities and some companies which had dumb terminals connected to the mainframe in the basement. The dumb terminals did not do any computing on their own. Instead, the mainframe performed the operations and sent the results back to the person behind the terminal. The terminals didn't have local storage, instead, all the data resided on the mainframe. Sounds familiar? These days, the dumb terminal is basically the 'device with web browser' and the mainframe equivalents are the thousands of servers getting you all the text, video and other content you request through the web browser.

The cloud we hear of today basically represents the same thing these early pioneers were doing with dumb terminals and mainframes. We just added more storage, more bandwidth and computation capacity and more distribution into the mix. Cloud Computing for doing the calculations your PC might not be suited for, Cloud Storage for distributed mass storage, etc. In the end, they're just a bunch of servers, networked together in a way we don't really care about as long as we have access to our data.

One big difference with the old mainframe systems from yesterday though: at least we could be certain (or make certain) that the data on those mainframes was safe and secure. Nowadays, everyone (companies included) moves their most private and sensitive information into the cloud without regard for privacy or security issues. You'd better watch out with what you put on some third party server you don't control...