What Exactly Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud is the new buzzword, which is creating ripples across the IT infrastructure world. Growing at a staggering rate of over 40% annually, cloud computing is now the most preferred and recommended way to manage IT infrastructure needs of any organization. In this article, we will try to analyses some history of clouds, and will understand what exactly cloud server hosting is.

In the mid-1980s, there was a new term called grid computing which was taking momentum. With Microsoft and IBM, the leading information technology companies taking great interest in this term, more and more research was put
into place to make it perfect. In very simple and layman terms, with grid computing, all physical computers, servers and data were put into a virtual space called grid so that the physical dependence on these entities was erased out. Hence, say a company with database A can transfer all their information into a grid A, which can be then accesses, edited and shared from anywhere in the world. Emails were the most basic examples of such grid computing, wherein a person can maintain his or her own special storage space, which was accessible globally and can be used to share, collaborate and edit data anytime the owner required, without dependence on the physical availability of hardware or software. Suddenly, everything related to IT infrastructure was on the virtual world, readily available to anyone and everyone.

Cutting back to 2003 and mid-2000s, this same grid computing came to be known as Cloud computing or in some
verticals, Cloud server hosting. Emails were still maintained on the grid or cloud and thus provided the much
needed benefit of scalability and portability. The term cloud was actually derived from the electronics and
electrical diagrams of circuit, wherein anything virtual or in the grid was described as inside a cloud like box. The term cloud was thus extracted from these series of virtual boxes, which denoted that the entity inside these cloud type boxes were not ‘physically’ present but rather exist virtually, which can be used anytime and anywhere; in short, they were geographically independent.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were the first companies to launch their exclusive Cloud server hosting services,
targeting those who didn’t want a physical location to store their data and information. In the year 2007,Google launched their personalized and advanced spreadsheets, word processing and presentation software’s on the cloud. Now, anyone with a cloud hosting access can create new spreadsheets or word processing files, edit them and share them on the go. Imagine a world where everything is on the virtual servers.

The same trend continued onto the enterprise level IT infrastructure and hardware needs, and slowly, every
entity associated with the IT: servers, workstations, huge databases, applications and software, everything was based on cloud. This was indeed a revolutionary progress in the field of Information technology hardware configurations and brought down the costs drastically. The trend is still continuing with more companies joining the bandwagon every single day.