The “Cloud” is another buzzword for what has always been just a data or server center. There are definitely new technologies develop to create what is now known as the “Cloud” but the word was mostly created as a marketing ploy for the consumers to understand. Some technologies like Condor which has been around since 1988 and now more recently Hadoop are in part what has brought the “Cloud” to the mainstream. Another thing that plays a big part into the growth of the “Cloud” is the growth in access to the internet with all the mobile devices and the such.
The “Cloud” has made it cheaper and easier to provide high quality services. The problem before was that as a developer, one had to set up any machine to be used as a server and make the necessary software for it while now there is much less setup involved. The developer does not need to buy a hundred thousand dollar datacenter and set it up since they can just spin up instances in AWS and achieve the same thing. A big problem with this separated approach is how to handle security since the provider of the servers must also have some form of security on top of the one you must create as the developer. Even considering these things the “Cloud” is a great tool to use as it is cheap and very reliable.
Another aspect of the “Cloud” is that of the consumers that are using it trough a company’s product. Now a day because of the “Cloud” a company can provide a gadget at a cheaper price for two reasons. The first reason is that the device itself can be made cheaper since parts of it a moved to the “Cloud”. The other reason is that by buying a device the company assumes that the user will then use other of the company’s products and services thus spending more money. The company now sells you a device and the ecosystem that surrounds it which can be a bigger deciding factor. So as a user the “Cloud” allows me the access everything I have on a device or ecosystem from anywhere in the world which is great but the fact that everything is online makes it so that if I’m ever offline then there are things I cannot access. The fact that everything is online means that if a company ever has a breach in security, my things are also in danger of being stolen.
As a developer you must consider the type of service you want your users to have and the security implications it has when considering using the “Cloud”. As a consumer you have to consider if you trust a company to kept your things save and what that companies ecosystem also provides you when considering a device that relies on the “Cloud”. In general I think the “Cloud” has become a great move forward in technology but from a cyber security perspective it is extremely scary considering how every other day we get a report about a company hack and how the users data was stolen. So like many other things it becomes a battle of security and convenience when considering anything related to the “Cloud”.
Norman Morales 