Which directrion will Cloud Computing take us Essay

Which directrion will Cloud Computing take us - Essay Example One of the themes that have been captured in this section is the threat posed by cloud computing on programming. This study will explore how this happens. The research concludes with lessons for the future and recommendations based on findings in the field of cloud computing. Background Information. Cloud computing is the fastest growing part of Information Technology. It is regarded as the fifth generation of computing after the mainframe, personal computer, client-server computing, and the web. It confers tremendous benefits to customers and users (Bechtolsheim, 2008). Experts have estimated that by the year 2012, the size of cloud computing infrastructure market will rise to $42 billion, up from $billion in 2008 (Bechtolsheim, 2008). This trend is as a result of the high growth rate in cloud spending, six times faster than the traditional IT spending. Stanley, states that public cloud workloads are expected to increase at the rate of 50% in the next three years, twice as the market currently expects (2011). Cloud computing represents a different way to architecture and managing remote computing resources. Its simplicity is evident in that one just needs to open an account with a service provider to start building and providing application systems into a cloud. The increased connectivity and increasing amount of data has led many service providers to employ large infrastructures with dynamic load and access balancing. This explains the reason behind the rapid growth in cloud computing. Service provider have been handing out and reproducing data across servers on demand, thereby improving the utilization of resources. This has enabled web servers to offer accessibility across multiple servers and routes according to the traffic (Jefrey, K. and Lutz, 2010). Cloud computing is not a novelty. It dates back to the 1990s where the ability of active traffic switching to stabilize utilization and to indicate virtualization of telecoms infrastructure became in use. Other data centers employed methods to maintain scalability and reliability in order to ensure the availability o f their hosted data. In the recent times, multiple cloud domains have emerged which explains the reason behind the many definitions and meanings of cloud computing. There are expectations in the industry that cloud model will find further uptake in future as means to manage the infrastructure of providers and provide small units with the capacities of a larger communications beyond their means. Warr (2009) says that big companies have an advantage over smaller ones as they can afford to expand their own data centers, unlike their counterparts who have house their IT infrastructure in someone else’s facility. cloud computing has enabled the development of coloration centers where multiple customers can locate network, server and storage assets, and connect to a wide range of telecommunications and other network service providers with minimum cost and complication (Warr, 2009) There exist various definitions and interpretations of cloud computing/cloud, hence one can only give a representative and not a comprehensive definition of the term (ELC, 2010). Lutz and Jeffrey define cloud as an elastic execution environment involving numerous stakeholders and providing a metered service at several granularities for a particular level of quality. Cloud computing is defined as the active provisioning of IT capabilities-‘hardware, software or services’- from third parties above a network-system (Warr,2009). ELS define it as an outsourcing of IT infrastructures via the internet. It saves the agony of maintaining hardware and software