Over the Cloud and far away…

Few years back when I used to like a favorite song, I used to listen it for hours repetitively .. be it in the
Computer, Cellphone or any device. I made sure to feed that file everywhere.

Now i just upload the file to my virtual folder at a website and then connect my Computer, Cellphone and other devices to that website to listen to it.

Real time video calling and chatting with your old school friend who is in US is just a few click away.

The power of Cloud. Yes its a technology and am so in love with it. Getting all the stuffs at one place and no need to browse different folders at different devices. Now the situation is such that I hardly open my other Laptop and the Computer, it about to rust in few months. In layman terms, I’ve put my stuffs online.

So when I was home last time, I didn’t carry the external Hard drive. I showed mom all the office pics which I stored in my virtual folder. So its not just songs but pictures as well. And no, location is not a limitation.
All you need to have is Internet.

Whenever we say cloud, I picturise those white fluffy airy thing.. cold and floating. Well here the case is
slight different. Cloud is the short form of Cloud Computing. And these are nothing but servers or group or servers which are always online and connected to the internet. They can be located anywhere Globally.

Another good example is emails. Every tom, dick & harry has an email today. Be it Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail.. I have it all!! We see the same emails at different devices because they are located at a centralized location which we access every time. So we see the same thing again and again.
Now imagine, there was no cloud technology then? So now that your emails are located at a server which is not on cloud rather its at an office premises .. so what happens if there’s an electricity shortage or power cut? The server turns off and you see that your email page unavailable. Then they would put a generator and UPS to support that email server.. and since so many people would be accessing that server, it will be working day and night and the server would be hot to very hot. So they put an AC to cool that server? Right then there’s always a hardware life and maintenance is necessary. So they put a maintenance guy from time to time to clean up the server.

The cost? So how much do you pay for Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail? None!! That’s what cloud does for you. No it doesn’t pay for your costs or the server maintenance guy costs. It just eliminates huge costs so that the user uses the service for free.

Personally, cloud has impacted tremendously and is becoming powerful day by day due to the rapid innovations. Did you ever imagined that you could transfer money from your mobile application at an odd hour or on a holiday? No right? But Cloud made it possible.
If I give you an Enterprise wide glimpse, more and more organizations are choosing to go online. Corporate players have a lot to choose and gain from. There are private clouds for organizations who wants to utilize cloud only for their internal purposes..

An organization may have lot of pain points when it comes to management like attendance management, people management, finance management, travel management and so much more.. and when they have multiple location presence it a chaos. The HR managers, Finance managers, Admins would go berserk tracking all the data and compile them.

God bless those people who came up with application softwares like Enterpise Resource Management – ERP, Human Resource Management Systems – HRMS etc. Early years, these applications used to be on premises which only help little and then when cloud came and connected these applications.. its was a blessing.

Now the HR knows, which employee came late in Chicago and Seattle while sitting at her Gurgaon office and process salaries globally.

The good part is, thought it comes for a cost, even the small companies can afford one. It’s not just limited to the big players.

Then comes the security part. Enterprise cloud services come along with those mumbo jumbos which help eradicate viruses and hackers thought they put extra security like firewalls and VPNs etc. For people like us who use such technology for free are still vulnerable. You never know who can get access to what and this topic can be debatable for hours. As we know, all good things comes with a bad thing as well. Assuming that our antivirus can take care of such insecurities, I still choose to put my stuffs online .. just for the convenience and availability part.

I await the day how cloud collaboration can help you find better traffic route to your office or get a nice hotel room at your budget while you plan your holidays. I guess I can imagine anything…