I don’t know about you but I am find­ing that I am turn­ing more and more to web based applic­a­tions and data stor­age in the “cloud” rather than desktop soft­ware applic­a­tions and a hard drive that resides on a single machine, for my day-to-day com­put­ing needs.

Huh?

Let me explain.

Tra­di­tion­ally the stand­ard approach to run­ning soft­ware on a com­puter is to install a copy of it on the machine that it was to be used on. The User then works with that soft­ware as needed at that par­tic­u­lar com­puter. A cost per User in the form of a ‘license fee’, pay­able to the soft­ware issuer is needed to keep things nice and legal and any bugs or prob­lems with the soft­ware are solved by installing ‘patches’ or ‘updates’ either from a floppy disk (as was), CD or as now; from the soft­ware vendor’s web­site over the Net. In time the soft­ware becomes out­dated and the User is pushed into pur­chas­ing an ‘upgrade’ which they then re-install into their indi­vidual computer.

Think of Microsoft Word™. That’s a piece of word pro­cessing soft­ware that as a User, you buy a license for, install onto your PC from a CD, down­load updates from the Microsoft web­site and in time, pur­chase an upgrade to the next ver­sion. It’s how Microsoft and most other soft­ware vendors such as Sage™, Adobe™, Norton™ etc, make their money and is ser­i­ous busi­ness on a global scale. If a second User in your office also needs a copy of Word on their PC, then the whole license pur­chase, install and update pro­cess has to be rep­lic­ated for each addi­tional machine that requires the soft­ware on it.

Times are a Changing

How­ever there’s a new kid on the block when it comes to com­put­ing that is really put­ting the wind-up the major soft­ware houses such as Microsoft as it’s hit­ting them hard where it hurts, namely in the license fee rev­enue department.

The new kid is called Cloud Com­put­ing.

Cloud Com­put­ing allows Users to access and work with soft­ware applic­a­tions cent­rally, over the web through their web browser and without the need to pur­chase and install a piece of soft­ware on their computer.

The big bene­fits of this as far as the User is con­cerned are:

• The same applic­a­tion can be used on any num­ber of com­puters so long as they each have a web browser and an Inter­net con­nec­tion. There’s no need to install the soft­ware on to each machine.
• Updates and upgrades are done cent­rally by the applic­a­tion host (the com­pany that main­tains the soft­ware on the web). No need to down­load updates, install patches etc.
• There are no large licens­ing fees needed each time an upgrade is needed. Applic­a­tions in the “Cloud” are paid for by sub­scrip­tion which depend­ing upon the level of sub­scrip­tion, allows any num­ber of Users to access the application.
• Data is stored cent­rally on remote serv­ers in the ‘Cloud’. This makes the work­ing envir­on­ment totally port­able and inde­pend­ent of any single machine. Ima­gine, you work on a doc­u­ment in the office using a web based applic­a­tion. Save it. When you get home or move to another office dur­ing the day, so long as you can access the web, you can con­tinue work­ing on the same doc­u­ment even if it’s someone else’s computer.

It’s Already Here

Com­puter applic­a­tions that are based on Cloud Com­put­ing con­cepts are already here and are being used by people like you and me, half the time without us even real­ising it.

For example, if you use any of the applic­a­tions that come with Google Apps, you’re already into Cloud Com­put­ing. Sim­il­arly if you use one of the web based busi­ness account­ancy applic­a­tions that are start­ing to spring up, then again you’re into Cloud Com­put­ing. Sim­il­arly Face­book, Flickr and many other social net­work­ing sites that store their data online and offer inter­activ­ity are a form of Cloud Com­put­ing it can be said.

I myself use Google Apps, our online pro­ject man­age­ment tool is based in the Cloud and I man­age my Twit­ter account using a web applic­a­tion called Twith­ive hav­ing switched from a soft­ware based one called Tweet­Deck (which is also very good by the way).

So if you want to free your­self from your PC start to look at Cloud Com­put­ing applic­a­tions. Admit­tedly I haven’t come across Cloud based equi­val­ents of Microsoft’s Office™ range that are as power­ful (that’s the key phrase here) how­ever, no doubt in time some will arrive on the scene.

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