The Cloud - Part 1

Who would have thought a search engine called Google formed in 1998 would create a cloud infrastructure so rich in product offerings that their initial AI used in search technologies would become so important. Currently No 3 in the world for cloud revenue.

Or an online retailer called Amazon, formed in 1994, could boast, that in 2012, 1 percent of all Internet traffic in North America traveled in and out of Amazon.com data centres. Now No 1 in the world for cloud revenue.

And then in 1974, Microsoft, a computer company would start Azure, now No 2 in the world in cloud revenue.

Years ago, some would ask "Is the cloud just someone else's data centre?"

But here and now it is understood, cloud computing has facilitated a new economic model for infrastructure services and lowered the entry barrier for highly demanding applications, particularly in the areas of big data and artificial intelligence.

So you may ask, at what point did we stop calling it just a data centre and start calling it the cloud?

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines the following five essential traits that characterise cloud computing:

• On-demand, self service
• Broad network access
• Resource pooling
• Rapid elasticity or expansion
• Measured service

In part 2, we talk about how organisations access the cloud and also the other players such as IBM and Salesforce.