Cloud Computing: The Next Golden Era in IT Sector

Over the long term, absence of other barriers, Economics always wins.

Cloud Computing is the new rage in the IT. The problem is everyone seems to have a different definition for it. As a metaphor for the internet, "the cloud" is quite familiar, but when combined with "computing" the meaning gets big and fuzzy. Cloud computing is basically internet-based computing, where shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, just like electricity grid.

A webmail is a simple cloud computing example where anyone can access their webmail from anywhere in the world simply by knowing the web address of the webmail service, there's no need to know the name of the server or an ip address or anything else. The webmail provider takes on the job of making sure that there's enough disk space and processing power to allow all their customers to store and retrieve their mail on demand. The user doesn't have to worry about maintaining web clients on their PC or, in case of companies, local email servers.

Cloud computing is the 5th generation of computing (after mainframe, personal computer, client-server computing and the web). The cloud computing infrastructure market is estimated to grow to around $70 billion in the next 5 years, up from $16 billion in 2008. Cloud spending is growing 6 times faster than the traditional IT spending.

Cloud Computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always need: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT's existing capabilities.

Cloud computing provides resource availability along the lines of pay-as-you-use model. In a typical use scenario of an application running on a cloud, the idea would be to optimize the resources that the application requires and only have sufficient resources that are requires for the application to run. As and when the resource demand increases due to usage loads and to be able to meet the SLA (Service Level Agreement) defined for that application, additional resources should be added to fulfill the demands and again removed when the demand decreases. With this model of being able to dynamically manage resources, the cost substantially reduces since the cost is always calculated based on the resource requirements in a dynamic manner as well as the SLA can be met. So the basic thing that is driving it is ECONOMICS.

According to Steve Ballmer India is going to lead in cloud computing. He even said that India will not only see a surge in cloud computing services but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing. Microsoft Corp, the world's biggest software maker is among a handful of companies betting big on cloud computing, aiming to convince enterprises to give up building and managing data centres and switch to their computer capacity instead. The other players in cloud computing are Amazon, Google, AT&T as well as smaller firms like Rackspace and Terremark. Microsoft believes that India will move directly to the cloud services, much like how it bypassed the landline revolution that never happened and leapt to mobile phones. This transition that India will champion will seed 3 lakh jobs in 5 years. Microsoft already has more than 600 customers for its cloud services, but wants a deeper head start over rivals. The company is therefore sparing no efforts in making its cloud computing push a success in India, a market that is developing very nicely and where piracy is reducing and intellectual property protection is better than in China.

So with such good revolutionary prospects, investing in companies involved in providing cloud computing solutions would be a good fruitful long term investment.