Computing in the Cloud – is it like banking?
I hear often comparison of IT and computing in the cloud with other “commodities”. Some people say, well, we do get the water and electricity centrally, why would we not get the computing centrally as well? There could be suppliers of computing power that one could use over the network and then one would not need to actually invest into own computing infrastructure. You would just send the data and the required operations into the cloud and get back results.
This is very much how the mainframes worked in the old days, you know? You would have a large computer somewhere in a computer room and you would connect to it from a terminal and submit tasks. The mainframe would compute your tasks and provide the answers. It seems pretty much the same familiar concept now all over again. But, wait, is it? In the old days, your mainframe would be inside the organization, it would still be under your control completely, the data would never leave the building, so to say. Yes, it could be physically in a different location but it would remain within the same company, university or whatever organization actually owned the mainframe. That is not …
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