Cloud for mobiles

Sonal Chawla

Cloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. So whether we are running applications that share photos to millions of mobile users or the critical operations of our business is being supported, the cloud provides rapid access to flexible and low-cost IT resources. With cloud computing, no large upfront investments in hardware are needed instead we can access as many resources as we need, almost instantly, and only pay for what we use.

Let’s take an example of a large corporation wherein all employees have to be provided with the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Now buying computers, software or software licences or even upgrade the current licences can give a nightmare to any firm.

Cloud computing provides an excellent alternative to such organisations. Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, it does the entire thing by loading only one application. That application will allow workers to log into a web-based service which hosts all the programmes the user will need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company will run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programmes.

This is cloud computing, the slight flavour of which has already been tasted when we access an e-mail account with a web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. Here instead of running an e-mail programme on our computer, we log in to a web e-mail account, which doesn’t exist on our computer but on the cloud.

So we see that cloud computing systems make a significant workload shift. The user has to only bother about the interface though they can communicate to the cloud. This can be as simple as a web browser and the cloud’s network takes care of the rest.

Let’s look at another scenario. How good it will be if this cloud can secure all my mobile contacts, family pictures and other irreplaceable data and we don’t worry at all about the accidental damages like dropping the phone or theft of it, etc. since all the backup is being maintained somewhere else too i.e. on the cloud.