Before understanding the cloud, we need to understand its history and how data was managed in earlier days like in the 1960s. The answer is Mainframes.
Mainframes were large and high computing platforms. These systems were managed in a separate large room or hall with all necessary power backup, cooling, and data backup maintenance. This was a huge investment for the company. So, not every company could afford this system.
After some time, a group of companies in a particular area came together and set up mainframe systems on a large platform to keep sharing the computing power among them all in order to reduce the cost of the system and maintenance for each, and this platform was called a Data Center.
Later, some third-party companies started investing in these data centers. They started selling the space for each company to set up their hardware, such that this third party company was responsible for maintenance by providing enough power backup and maintaining the systems in cooling conditions, as these were too costly if each company wanted to keep one on their premises.
In the 1980s, new, less expensive, and compact hardware components got invented. With this, every company started investing to buy their own hardware and maintain it themselves. In this way, the data centers' popularity decreased. With the introduction of client/server architecture, companies started purchasing inexpensive systems that were as useful as the traditional mainframe systems.
In the 1990s, with the popularity of the internet, companies started maintaining the systems at each remote office, which would get synced to head office ( internet speed was not as fast as today). But this was too expensive for the company. And so the systems got de-Centralized.
Since 2000, internet power has increased due to high-speed broadband, and the companies again replaced the remote computing systems with web services. Using web services, we can directly interact with the head office and get enough information without the need to maintain any data at remote offices, as we can keep pushing the data to the head office server. This way, we increase the security of the data and the availability of data at every remote office.
As we were all in the same circle, we maintained all the remote offices' data at a single head office server. This was too risky as we needed to provide good power backup, data backup, and also enough hardware to accomplish it. Now, the Cloud is the solution, where instead of maintaining datacenters at one place, it will be maintained and replicated across multiple locations geographically such that the nearest datacenter will serve the information. The benefits of the cloud are:
- Faster response of data
- Redundant data will secure our data and always be available in case any datacenter gets shut down.
I will dig into more details on how Cloud Computing is more advantageous to an individual/organization, in my next upcoming article.