It’s hard to imagine life before the internet. A world filled with papercuts and ink stains where we all looked up to the clouds, hoping for something better. Coincidentally, we were looking in the right direction.
Cloud computing caught on after the turn of the 21st Century – after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. Understanding how cloud computing has evolved over the years offers a unique perspective on the speed by which technology travels.
Early Days of Cloud Computing
The cloud, and its related services, wasn’t some technology that CIOs and business leaders inherently knew what to do with when it first became truly useful. Because there wasn’t much information available about cloud computing and the benefits associated with it, maximizing cloud ROI was difficult.
Not only were computers, servers and other required IT infrastructure especially cost prohibitive for businesses, but there was no clear-cut and widely accepted definition of what cloud computing actually was, what it meant, or even what benefit it held for companies.
Once the dot-com bubble burst, the remaining technology companies that survived realized they had to figure out a better way of doing things.
Amazon was the first to invest heavily in cloud computing, and they officially entered the cloud market in 2006. As a matter of fact, other than MySpace, it was Amazon that actually pioneered cloud computing and proved it a worthwhile investment for other companies. By 2008, Google became more than just a search engine as they too expanded into the cloud space.
However, the public cloud still wasn’t born and wasn’t perceived in such a positive way as it is today. IT attention shifted focus to “private clouds,” and companies such as Microsoft, Rackspace and others who had the technological capabilities and understanding to implement cloud computing solutions for the marketplace were happy to play on the fears of data security to cause a dramatic market shift into private clouds for several years.
Cloud Computing Today
Cloud computing as we know it today, with a great deal of trust placed in the public cloud, as well as hybrid cloud solutions, began in 2010. Rackspace and NASA actually teamed up to launch the open source platform OpenStack. This joint venture paved the way for companies and individuals to test applications in a private lab of sorts before rolling out those applications for the public on the public cloud. Without this partnership, it’s impossible to predict exactly when we would have been comfortable accepting the public cloud and all the benefits it has to offer.
It wasn’t long before the hybrid cloud was born, which combines public and private cloud environments for the best of both worlds – maximum access to productivity tools and applications, but maximum security as well. This occurred in 2011 and the market hasn’t looked back since. We now see that over 70% of enterprise companies have adopted some form of cloud applications within their business model, more and more organizations adopting mobile workforce strategies, and business owners and individuals alike having a much better understanding of the benefits cloud computing provides.
The Future of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is here to stay. It’s become so widely adopted and integrated so deeply into the daily lives of people, and the day-to-day operations of practically every business on the planet that it truly isn’t going anywhere. However, the major issues facing cloud computing today have much to do with security.
New online security threats are being developed, deployed and discovered every single day. These threats are a great risk to cloud computing providers, services and those relying on them because a devastating cyber attack has the potential to bring a company down for weeks, if not months. The costs associated with recovering from such events are so staggering that many SMBs end up shutting their doors within six months of data loss or critical downtime events.
That’s why reputable IT companies such as EaseTech, and many other major corporations in the industry, are doing all they can to develop new security tools and applications to proactively monitor and prevent such attacks from ever being an issue.