From Horizon to Horizon

No matter where you look, cloud technology is blanketing the IT industry

- CODY CLARK

It’s generally accepted that American novelist and humorist Samuel Clemens made a famous comment about the weather in New England. To wit, Clemens remarked that anyone finding the current presence (or absence) of rain or snow, of a cooling breeze or muggy heat, not to their liking should simply wait briefly and it would change.

Clouds, as we conceive of them in information technology (IT) terms, do not more or less directly determine weather the way that atmospheric clouds do — but there is a sense in which Clemens’ observation could be applied to them: Cloud technology is expanding so rapidly, and being put to such a variety of uses, that if it’s not available to affect something that interests you, well, just wait a few minutes.

The rate of change and growth in cloud computing has certainly been dizzying. Cloud computing as most people think of it — which probably lags a few iterations behind how many businesses already use it — has been with us for about 10 years. Amazon Web Services (AWS) had barely crested the horizon by the end of 2006, and Microsoft’s competing Azure service didn’t show up until 2010.

The paradigm is already shifting, however, from the mental image many people have of cavernous server rooms remotely managing everything from data storage to business software distribution. Experts predict that distributed cloud computing, which involves cloud service providers scattering their computing load to far-flung “micro data centers” geographically closer to customers, will become both figuratively and literally widespread by 2023.

Tech Roots

What area of IT were you most heavily involved in prior to pursuing cloud computing?