What is “The Cloud?”

On its latest, by invitation only, technology talks, Accenture talks about the cloud. The Cloud has been around for some time, and many of us were not even aware that we’ve been using it. If you’ve used Google Docs, Yahoo Mail, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft SkyDrive then you’ve been touched by the “cloud”.

According to Accenture’s senior executive for capital markets practice Lloyd Altman, the cloud means having your servers in the cloud so that you can gain efficiency of scale. So it means, if you run a website or an online service, you no longer have to keep expanding your servers or keep massive storage drives. For the simple end user like you and me, you no longer even have to have a physical storage drive for your ordinary day to day computing needs.

Cloud computing is a new generation of computing that allows you to use the Internet for access to IT-based services. Businesses can use the internet to access services such as infrastructure, platform, applications, and business processes. All you need is a browser and the internet.

Applications like VMware lets you create a virtual computer that you can virtually upgrade anytime you want. If you want virtual storage, Microsoft SkyDrive gives you free 25 gigabyte virtual drive while Google Docs lets you store up to 5000 documents on its servers so you can save and access important documents from anywhere. If you’ve noticed, you now have unlimited storage space in your Yahoo Mail so you can keep and save all your emails and its attachments on yahoo’s servers. In the social networking realm, Facebook has become everyone’s online photo album.

More and more online services have also started to migrate to the cloud, to save on the cost of having to keep full scale IT infrastructures. Cloud computing makes every business free to upscale and downscale on their IT infrastructures anytime without the necessary costs of having to buy new servers. Cloud computing literally lets you run your business totally virtual.

Cloud computing basically makes every business highly flexible and scalable. It lets you have shared servers and resources, software and data to technology devices on demand. With cloud services, you gain the benefit of the ultimate convenience of working from anywhere with no additional hardware required. Cloud service also makes your business extremely flexible as you can easily tailor your technology to your specific needs. By taking advantage of cloud services, you instantly receive everything you need for your business without the unexpected costs or prolonged installation wait times. It enables your businesses to build, host and scale applications in the cloud service provider’s data centers.

In Accenture’s latest technology talk, their aim is to enable every business to pay only for the services and resources you use. The speakers in the technology talk seem to promote the cloud on a “pay as you go model” for businesses.

According to IDC in Accenture’s website – by 2013, cloud services will make up 10 percent of worldwide IT spending.

Benefits of the cloud for the businesses include rapid acquisition, low to no capital investment, relatively low operating costs, and variable pricing tied directly to use.

Accenture sees the cloud as the convergence of three worlds: consumers, business and technology. The rise of mobility, social networking and mobile devices has created a new norm for interaction with customers and employees. At the same time, businesses are experiencing speed-to-market and cost containment pressures as never before. Technologies for virtualization, open-source software, automation, and bandwidth availability continue to evolve.

People or customers have increasingly demanded more services at the least possible cost.

The Cloud can connect customers and citizens anytime, anywhere, eliminating organizational boundaries.

With the cloud, people can have electronic health records to follow patients from doctor to doctor, allowing more coordinated care. Applications such as product barcode scanners bring instantaneous, online comparison shopping. Global peer-to-peer lending services allow consumers to sidestep banks with hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions. Applications such as Pandora and Genius for iTunes aggregate and analyze users’ feedback in real time.

The cloud is here to stay.