Cloud Business Computing Has Leveled The Playing Field

Copyright (c) 2011 Sandra Tiffany

When the internet was first developed, it was primarily centered in universities. There were few resources and most of the activity was academically focused.

As the capability of computational services, computer technology, the use of the internet increased and communication speed increased, simple user groups and limited resources have grown.

There is now a plethora of resources, services and capabilities that cross-reference each other and reinforce each other in ways hardly imagined by the early designers. This ability to access information on a single screen, about a single subject from any part of the globe and any server storing similar information is now identified as Cloud Computing.

Way back in the 1970s, a little company called Computer Machinery Corporation developed a process called Distributed Processing. Basically this was the ability of several mainframe computers to work together on single projects. The computers could be specialized and contain specific data but be integrated, through the distributive process to present a user with information from that computer.

For example, a user might want to access some employee information. Some of that information could be stored at the company headquarters where payroll, vacation time and raises/promotions are calculated.

At a second site, information about daily activities performed by the employee might be tracked and at a third site, insurance plans and usage might be tracked. Yet when someone from Human Resources accessed the employee name, data from each computer was assembled onto a screen displayed from the query.

While this is a specific example, it shows the basis for the concept of cloud computing. The cloud business computing process saves money, time and storage space because data from one site does not have to be duplicated on another site, it is all in "the cloud" and can be extracted and used at will from any location.

A quick internet search gives several links about cloud computing. None of the links identify a specific "inventor" of the concept but on several pages, Eric Schmidt is given credit as the first person to use the concept publicly. Evidently Mr. Schmidt was giving a marketing presentation and mentioned the concept as part of his talk on integration of separate resources towards a specific goal. These resources could come from any number of disassociated sources and the only thing that brought them together was the query for information.

What this basically indicates is that the concept probably arose from the work of several different people and companies. Outside of Computer Machinery Corporation, as mentioned above, there was some talk in the 1980s about network mechanics resembling an electrical grid where power resources were allocated from a number of sources depending on demand.

n the 1990s when network grids were sometimes associated with a "cloud", several companies including Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google use the concept and have developed products and product lines based on it.

The search technologies or "bots" developed by Google are probably based on the cloud concept, as well, but that information is proprietary so it would be impossible to verify it without consent from Google. Any time a browser such as Google, Firefox, IE, or Safari does a search and builds a screen, some kind of search algorithm scans as many separate data storage servers as it can to mine the information asked for in the query. These are ranked by certain criteria such as commonality, keyword match, level of importance, proximity and other criteria specific to the search engine and displayed on a series of screens.

When scrolling through the screens, there might be local information, but also data from servers on the other side of the country or world. The data mining strategies used for searches can also be used to build information data streams in the same way.

A lawyer using cloud business computing, looking for legal precedents may access Lexus/Nexus, a search engine specific to law and public records to build a file of proceedings with rulings specific to a case being tried. The cases can be from any number of courts, states, counties, cities and the federal government. All this data would be assembled as a result of the inquiry. The lawyer would simply scroll through all the data and select those that bolster the case and information that could be against the case.

Businesses in Mumbai, India can now successfully compete with similar businesses in Berlin, London or New York.

The cloud concept has leveled the business access playing field and the trend will continue growing as the cloud increases in size with ever more software, computing power, sophisticated retrieval algorithms and massive storage capabilities.

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