ANDREWS UNIVERSITY AFFILIATED AND EXTENSION PROGRAMS

UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTHERN CARIBBEAN

P.O. BOX 175, PORT OF SPAIN.

Assignment 2

An Assignment
Presented in Partial Fulfilment
Of the Requirements for the Course
CPTR416 INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES

INSTRUCTOR: Mr. Connell Byron Hunte

By

Besrick Morgan

26 February 2010

Approval …………………
From our day in, day out from home to the office or from school to home, we tend to have a
bunch of stationeries and or gadgets accompanying us. At the end of the journey to which ever
destination, we may have left behind an important document that we were supposed to bring
along. This can be a pain and time consuming and if anything else cause us to lose out on
opportunities whether monetary or not. This is where Cloud Computing comes into play, though
not necessarily a new technology, it’s really just taken off in the modern age of computing.
Major corporate companies are now pushing this technology forward namely; Google,
Microsoft, Amazon etc. Now the meat of the matter is whether it is a value solution or villain
technologies. As this is deeper explored, we find that this Cloud Computing is not for everyone
and how evil it could be despite having such good advantages.
What is Cloud Computing? Cloud Computing Running applications in an Internet server or
downloading the software from the Internet each time it is used. The phrase "in the cloud" may
refer to a company's own network, but the term "cloud computing" almost always refers to the
Internet and the use of Web browser-based or rich client applications. For example, Google Apps
and Zoho provide common business applications online that are accessed from a Web browser.
The software comes from the Web servers, and the data may be stored on the servers as well.
Another definition states that it is performing enormous numbers of scientific calculations in
hundreds or thousands of idle machines within an enterprise or in the Internet. These definitions
were taken from the Computer-Desktop Encyclopaedia.
Journalist Jon Brodkin states in his article that Gartner the information technology research and
advisory company defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which massively scalable
IT related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using internet technologies to multiple external
customers.” Mr Brodkin further goes into saying the cloud is not technology by itself but the
building of IT services that harnesses the power of serves as well as virtualization technologies
that combine many servers into large computing pools and divide single servers into multiple
virtual machines that can be spun up and powered down at will.
Times Online journalist Jonathan Weber puts it as “that vast computing resources will reside
somewhere out there in ether (rather than in your computer room) and we’ll connect to them and
use them as needed.” Webopedia gives its definition as “A type of computing, comparable
to grid computing that relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or
personal devices to handle applications. The goal of cloud computing is to apply
traditional supercomputing, or high-performance computing power, normally used by military
and research facilities, to perform tens of trillions of computations per second, in consumer-
oriented applications such as financial portfolios or even to deliver personalized information, or
power immersive computer games.”
In all that’s just a few definitions and you see they vary and cloud computing systems vary also
because there is really no standard. But the goal from all meanings is that cloud computing takes
away all or most the hardware/computer resources focus for/from the end user, all they have to
do is access what they want in the cloud from the internet anywhere . No need to worry about
buying software to use or whether or not you copied that important file to your flash drive
because everything is accessible on the internet in cloud computing.
Cloud Computing the value solution aspect, three words that will hit any business in their face
when talking about this technology; it being flexible, low-cost and agile. A large public cloud
data centre will achieve large cost savings for power use, network bandwidth, operations
staffing, hardware and software, while greatly increasing flexibility for user organisations.
Economic benefits of greatly reduced entry cost, and cost of infrastructure and system
maintenance and also almost instant scalability to respond very rapidly to corporations changing
needs and cash flow.
Fast start-up is an advantage here where start-up companies could find ways of utilizing cloud
computing and tests their business plan very quickly for little money. Scalability as Tom Nolle,
CEO of CIMI, a high-tech consulting firm says “If you’ve got enormous peaks and valleys,
you’re forced to oversupply IT resources to address the peaks. It may be less costly for you to
outsource the peaks,” With cloud computing the business would pay less focus about their IT
resources since another company being cloud would manage it and they can penetrate on their
business aspect. Business agility, with being able to inject your computer resources to a cloud,
you spend less worrying about the quirks and hiccups of your data etc. Because the cloud would
have a management and support company to do all that for you so you don’t need a long term
commitment and as many IT professionals if you were housing your own resources yourself.
This goes into faster product development, being able to access to applications from the internet
rather than have them natively installed on a machine is a time saver, as you do not have to
worry about compatibility or availability on a computer at home or anywhere. All you need is the
internet to do your work. Lastly but not least, no capital expenditures, no need to for space to
hold data centres’. Less hardware and less software to take up expenditures so no more
headaches over cost. “Cloud computing services allow a company to shift from capital to
operational expenses even in do-or-die cases” says Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStatus, a
consulting firm specializing in advanced IT technologies.
From a Personal computing aspect, it’s pretty much the same advantages, as a student could
spend less rather than buying top-notch computer, he or she could buy a descent spec computer
since most of what they would need applications, music, photos , other files and even digital
textbooks would be stored on the cloud.
BBC’s Bill Thompson says, “Behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the ‘cloud’ is no such
thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every
instruction is processed by a physical computer and every network interaction connects two
locations in the real world. In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political
imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog
over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
story.” You see depending on where your cloud services are being offered, your files are
susceptible to any local law where it resides. So Canada for example had/has “a policy of not
allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over
data protection.” The USA patriot Act states that the FBI and other agencies can review “content
stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state.” The UK
has similar authority laid out in Its Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Whether or not your cloud service is near or far, you will always require a constant internet
connection. Since you are using the internet to connect to both your applications and documents,
if there is no connection then there is no work to be done. It is impossible to get any work done,
because there is no cloud computing without an internet connection. And since connections in
some places are still not available if not unreliable, this could be a deal-breaker. Upon having a
connection, you not only have to make sure it’s fast but could handle a huge bandwidth. If an
organization is quite large, or depending on the files being worked on in the cloud e.g. (media
files) it can fill-up the bandwidth real quickly and might cost more to you than if you had your
own storage farms.
A private cloud might, but a public cloud definitely wouldn’t lead to improved application
performance not when taking network latency into account. Furthermore not all data might be
cloud-worthy, if an application provides competitive advantage or contains customer-sensitive
information; you wouldn’t want to put that in a public cloud. Stored data might not be secure.
With cloud computing, all your data is stored on the cloud. Now you have to ask yourself how
secure is the cloud? Can unauthorized users gain access to your confidential data? Cloud
computing companies say that data is secure, but it’s too early in the game to be sure of that.
Same way as if you had the data on your own storage, it could be lost in the cloud. Theoretically,
data stored in the cloud is unusually safe, replicated across multiple machines. But on the off
chance that your data goes missing you have no physical or local backup. So relying on the cloud
alone puts you at risk if the cloud lets you down. Recently in the ending of 2009, they were quite
some problems with hosted services (which is an aspect of cloud computing). Blackberry owners
were experiencing problems with their devices because RIM servers were not working properly
due to outages and Sidekick owners in the US almost lost all their data due to outages. So these
customers had to make due until the problem was fixed by either parties and at that they weren’t
even sure.
On the other side when you store things on the cloud, you basically give up control, the cloud has
the right to delete your files if it deems u to be a risk and not even notify you. For Personal
computing the cloud is most useful for backup of files. On the business side, if you mainly do
work on the internet and or collaborate with people outside your country then the cloud is pretty
much for you.
In all we must not look at cloud computing lightly, evaluate all aspects and the main concern
with cloud computing now is its security, make sure you know what’s at the other end and how
it’s being done. Is it for you, it’s not for the internet impaired or the offline workers, the security-
conscious or those who have already heavily invested in software such as Microsoft Office.
Right now this technology in its full fledged skin is best suited for medium to small businesses.
Large organization would be better off to set up their own cloud rather than an external one. We
all use some form of the cloud today, SAAS, social networking etc. This technology is here to
stay and it is up to us whether or not it is a value solution or be considered as villain
technologies.
References
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Miller, Michael. 2009. ‘Cloud Computing Pros and Cons for End Users’. Accessed on: February
18, 2010 [Online] Available at: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1324280
Schultz, Beth. Network World 2009. ‘Cloud Computing: Pros and Cons’. Accessed on: February
18, 2010 [Online] Available at: http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2009/ndc3/051809-cloud-pro-
con.html

Ware, Crystal. 2009. ‘The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing’. Accessed on: February 18, 2010
[Online] Available at: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/the-pros-and-cons-of-cloud-
computing-832453.html

Carlos, Bruce. 2009. ‘The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing’. Accessed on: February 18, 2010
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Weber, Jonathan. 2008. ‘Cloud Computing’. Times Online Accessed on: February 18, 2010
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Brodkin, Jon. Network Work 2009. ‘FAQ: Cloud Computing, demystified’. Accessed on:
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Stoker, Matthew. 2008. ‘Cloud Computing Will Be Big for Large Corporations, Less So for
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Thompson, Bill. 2008. ‘Storm warning for cloud computing’. BBC News. Accessed on:
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Sarrel, Matthew D. 2009. ‘The Darker Side of Cloud Computing’. PC Magazine. Accessed on:
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