Cloud Computing And You

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome to this webinar on "Cloud Computing and You".    In this webinar, you will learn about what is cloud computing and how cloud computing can maximize the productivity and efficiency in both your personal and professional lives. My name is Krishnan Subramanian. I am CEO of Geeklogix Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a company offering consulting services to businesses all over the world, in the field of Open Source and Cloud Computing. I am also a partner with Mr. Varadharajan on two business ventures in India. We are going to launch one of them in the early part of 2009 and Mr. Varadharajan will talk to you about it. I do independent consulting to enterprises and, also, sit in the advisory committees of leading conferences and expo in the field of open source and cloud computing. I am also part of the editorial board of a new blog, on Cloud Computing, called Cloud Avenue (www.cloudave.com), sponsored by Zoho Inc.
• #3: Let me offer a brief overview of my plan for this webinar. First, I will give a brief introduction and then discuss how we do computing in today's world.    I will then explain what is cloud computing. After giving an introduction to the concept of Cloud computing, I will explain how it can shape our life, by bringing in a paradigm shift in the way we use computers and other computing devices. I will then briefly touch upon the current status and future promises in this field. This field is still at its infancy and we have a long way to go before we fully utilize its potential. Finally, I will conclude the talk and open myself to some questions from the audience.
• #4: All of us use computers and other computing devices like mobile phones, game controllers, etc. in our daily lives. Whether it is personal or professional activities, these computing devices have become an integral part of our daily activities. I am sure we all will agree that these computing devices has increased our productivity and efficiency compared to, let us say, a decade back.  Apart from the programming tasks, which we might do as a part of our professional lives, we use computers extensively for writing documents, managing spreadsheets, preparing and delivering presentations, email, instant messaging, voice and video chat, etc.. In this talk, I am going to introduce you a new concept called Cloud Computing and explain how it will change the way we do computing.
• #5: Before we dive into the Cloud Computing, let us take some time and understand how we use the technology today. Let us be clear about one thing. Most of us are still old fashioned in our technological living.
• #6: Let us take a step back and review how we do computing now. We buy powerful and expensive desktops and laptops. We buy expensive bloated software, like Microsoft Office, and install on them. These software are very expensive causing a severe dent on our wallets. Some of these applications we use includes Microsoft Office for document writing, spreadsheets and presentation, Adobe Photoshop for photo editing, Quicken or Microsoft money for finance management, etc.    Some people are using pirated software and they don't feel the pinch of these expensive applications. As a security professional in the past, I want to give a warning here. If you are using pirated software, please understand that you are making your computer and data vulnerable for hacking attacks.    Along with the big price tag, these software applications also use quite a bit of our computing resources. Once we step out of our desk, we can't access these applications. Say, you are in a friend's house or a client's place and you want to use these software applications, you are out of luck.    Suppose if the hard disk fails or motherboard fails in your computer, you lose all the applications and the associated customizations. You have to completely reinstall all these applications. You end up losing your valuable time and, in some cases, money. When we use these software applications, our data is stored in your hard disk. Some of us take a backup in the USB drives or other portable disks but most of us are content with keeping our data within the confines of our hard disks. If we are away from your desktop computer, we cannot access our data. Our data lies in silos without being useful for our needs. The absence of access to the applications from wherever we are and the lack of any option to access our data from anywhere we want and at any time we want, leads to a situation where we gain very little knowledge from those data or lose valuable business intelligence at crucial times. We do have broadband but we under utilize it. We use it for web surfing, online commercial transactions, email, chatting, music and videos. Actually, we are under utilizing it. In fact, we could access all our computing resources over broadband. I would say that we are only using 30% of the broadband's potential. Almost all of us use our mobile phones. For most of us, it doesn't offer anything other than a way to talk to other people. Often, we end up using our mobile phones for unwanted chitchats than anything meaningful. Our mobile phone acts more like a productivity killer than of any meaningful value. We have a very powerful device in our pockets and still we under utilize its value.
• #7: Having talked a bit about how we use computing devices now, let us get to the main topic of today's webinar, Cloud Computing.  Let us discuss what is Cloud Computing, how it is useful for us and when it can serve our purposes.
• #8: What is Cloud Computing? Long back, even before we could dream of the nearly ubiquitous availability of low cost computing device, one gentleman from Sun Micrososystems, John Gage, told that Network will act as a computer. He was talking about his dream of using computing resources over the network. But he was way too early for this concept and soon it was swept under the carpet. After so many years, we are seeing the birth and spread of the concept of cloud computing just as John had dreamt at that time.  Cloud Computing is the availability of raw computing resources, including processing power, storage, etc, and applications, including office productivity applications, photo editing applications, video editing applications, etc. over the internet.  You can just use the raw computing power for your needs just like how we use electricity or water from the tap. We can also store our data and make it available everywhere, anytime. We can use all kinds of software applications using the browser from whereever we are and whenever we need. In short, raw computing power, applications and data are available on demand.   Not only they are available on demand, they are also available wherever we are. All we need is a lightweight computing device and internet connection. More importantly, we will have access to all these computing resources from many different devices. It can be your desktop or laptop or iphone or other mobile phones or your television or your gaming systems, etc.. You have access to all these computing power from a wide variety of devices. The very idea of a computer has changed from what we are used to for the past several years.
• #9: Cloud Computing resources are available in variety of forms. They are available as    1) Infrastructure as a Service from Amazon, Go Grid, etc.. You can just rent computing power or storage power from these companies and use it. You can have a not so powerful computer at your desk and tap into powerful computing resources from Amazon for your data crunching or video processing needs. 2) Platform as a Service. These are available from Google and Microsoft and it will be helpful for developers to develop applications 3) Software as a Service. This is the area which will be of major interest for most of you attending the webinar today. You can use any kind of software, from office applications to photo editors to video editors to collaboration software, from the browser without the need to install anything. There are many players in this field with Google, Adobe, Salesforce, etc. being the main ones.
• #10: Let us now see how cloud computing can help you. Gone are those days where we spend lots and lots of money buying powerful computers and software applications. With cloud computing, individual users and very small businesses can get the applications for free or for a very low cost. Even for small to medium businesses, the costs are just fraction of what it was in the desktop world.  Unlike the desktop applications, all you need is to have a browser installed in the computer. So you don't need a quad processor with 3 GB of RAM to use your applications. A simple netbook with 512 MB RAM with a decent celeron processor will be enough to use these Cloud based applications. Plus, you can access your apps and data from any device. You can use your desktop or laptop or mobile phone or a dumb terminal at internet cafe. Issues live power failure or internet failure cannot be a deterrent to your business. There is no need to carry your data in USB drives. Then issues like losing USB drives or the data in it getting corrupted do not arise. Whether you are in your office or home or a friend's place or in a far away city or country, you can access the applications and data like how you will do in your office desk. There is no need to give excuse to the customer due to non availability of data or an application to access the data. It is not just the case of near ubiquitous availability of your data and application independent of location or device that is advantageous in Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing makes collaboration easy. You need not take the data in a CD or USB disk to give it to a partner or client. You don't even have to send it by email. You can easily collaborate with Cloud Applications and make it easy for your friend or client or partner to access your data. Any changes you make are applied to their views in real time. Gone are those days where you will keep sending a document back and forth when you collaborate with another person or a big group. If you make a change in your account, it is instantaneously transmitted to everyone you collaborate in real time. With Cloud Computing, your market is not just your town or your state or your country. You can do business at a global level just like how you will do with someone down the street. You can do a global business without even moving an inch away from your seat. In short, the peace of mind you get with Cloud Computing is something whcih even money can't buy.
• #11: Having explained the what and how of Cloud Computing, I will take some time to talk about the current status and the future promises.  As I told in the beginning, Cloud Computing is still at its infancy.
• #12: It is time for me to conclude this webinar.
• #13: Thank you and wait for the launch of CloudsDirect.