{"id":2751,"date":"2011-11-19T11:31:35","date_gmt":"2011-11-19T16:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/?p=2751"},"modified":"2011-12-19T11:35:19","modified_gmt":"2011-12-19T16:35:19","slug":"cloud-computing-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/cloud-computing-future\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Cloud Computing \u2013 Where it&#8217;s Going, and What it Means for You"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The more that one looks into and considers what cloud computing is, the more it takes on an eerie quality.\u00a0 As integrated into our lives and even commonplace as the internet has become, it shouldn&#8217;t take too much of a childlike sense of wonder to step back and realize how amazing it is that it even exists.\u00a0 Yet there remains a sense of solidity with it.\u00a0 My computer is here, and stores this information.\u00a0 My host is there, and stores that information.\u00a0 Overall, it is not a hard concept to understand.<\/p>\n<p>The cloud, though, introduces such a here-there-everywhere-nowhere dynamic that it&#8217;s very easy to get lost in the idea.\u00a0 By looking at it this way we are not just discussing a problem in beginner comprehension.\u00a0 It&#8217;s becoming noticed by many in the IT world that this technology is developing far faster than our ability to handle the breadth of its implications.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Collaborating under a cloud<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This has resulted in a sudden explosion of organizations, working groups, and companies frantically working together to create some sort of cloud standards that will keep it from devolving into a giant mess of incompatible, insecure and expensive alternatives.\u00a0 Here&#8217;s a quick summary of who the major players and movements are right now:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Open Data Center Alliance<\/strong> \u2013 Probably the largest of these organizations despite only just having passed its 1<sup>st<\/sup> birthday, the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) just recently published a suggested listed of cloud computing requirements.\u00a0 It has among its 280 members leaders in both the corporate and user-driven IT world.\u00a0 When Wall Street heavyweights like BMW, JPMorgan Chase and the Walt Disney Company join forces with respected IT organizations like Dell and Red Hat, you know that they&#8217;re working on something big.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cloud Security Alliance<\/strong> \u2013 Working with the ODCA is the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). Born from a call to action in 2008, the CSA is jam-packed with major business and IT organizations.\u00a0 Its goal is to develop a consistent, accepted set of cloud security standards.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cloud Standards Customer Council<\/strong> \u2013 This organization works to be the middle man between standard-setting organizations and \u201cend users\u201d, which in this case means companies that are seeking to adopt these technologies.\u00a0 It lists more than 100 corporate members, including Lockheed Martin and Citigroup.<\/li>\n<li><strong>OpenStack<\/strong> \u2013 OpenStack is a community-supported cloud-based operating system.\u00a0 It is currently in use by over 100 companies.\u00a0 The open-source (hence the name) OpenStack project was founded by RackSpace and NASA.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Open Cloud Initiative<\/strong> \u2013 This is a newer organization, announced a few months ago at the OSCON 2011 Open Source Convention.\u00a0 They appear to be reacting to problems they see in the way that cloud computing currently works with open-source standards, though it was not clear from their web site exactly what problems they were trying to address.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cloud Standards Wiki<\/strong> \u2013 Finally, it doesn&#8217;t get much more open than an organization whose main page is a wiki.\u00a0 The Cloud Standards Wiki is a place for all organizations doing work in this area to post their information and collaborate further.\u00a0 You can find information here about other organizations such as the Distributed Management Task Force, the Open Grid Forum, and the Object Management Group.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What are they trying to do?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>So what exactly are all of these groups trying to standardize?\u00a0 Here&#8217;s a quick rundown:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Security<\/strong> \u2013 This is the mother of all cloud problems.\u00a0 No technical terms are required here for you to see the problem: bits is going to be flying all over the place.\u00a0 Without a hardened set of standards, networks could become minefields of security weaknesses.\u00a0 Worse still is the potential in a cloud for a security breach to branch out like wildfire.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Interoperability<\/strong> \u2013 Quickly shared information and application use is going to require coordination of data and security protocols.\u00a0 It&#8217;ll be easy for cloud breakdowns or just inefficiencies to occur because parts of it are not setup to handle the communication standards of some of its other components.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Manageability<\/strong> \u2013 The existence of a cloud-based architecture is going to require a more sophisticated level of management created above it, both in technical and human forms.\u00a0 One study suggests that without some constructive coordination, the IT industry might spend $2 trillion in developing the management necessary to handle these changes just in the years 2010-2015 alone.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cost and efficiency \u2013<\/strong> Those $2 trillion in R&amp;D will be passed on to you.\u00a0 Nobody wants that.\u00a0 Soon there are going to be more internet ready devices in the world than people (maybe you&#8217;re surprised that there aren&#8217;t already).\u00a0 While this is not so much a standardization issue, high transition costs might significantly hamper all of the attempts at advancements in the above listed problems, creating a nasty vicious cycle of cloud chaos.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>So what does this mean to me?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The main people who want to keep a close eye on these developments are web site owners.\u00a0 If you have no interest in the web other than watching some movies and posting on Facebook, then you&#8217;re pretty much just along for the ride anyway.\u00a0 Of course, don&#8217;t let this stop you from being careful at all times no matter what you do.<\/p>\n<p>If you are hosting a website, then the main thing that you&#8217;ll want to do is just exercise caution when it comes to setting up an account with a cloud host.\u00a0 None of the above problems necessarily mean that any one host you pick is going to be unreliable.\u00a0 But when it comes to the cloud, we&#8217;re all in very (pardon the pun) foggy, uncharted territory here.\u00a0 If there is only a few dollars difference between using a cloud and using, say, a VPS (virtual private server), you may want to consider going for the latter for sake of simplicity.\u00a0 It may be more expensive, but you&#8217;re buying a bit of clarity with it.<\/p>\n<p>If you do decide to purchase a cloud-based hosting account, it&#8217;s going to probably get to a point soon where web hosts will be advertising the types of standards that their cloud services run by.\u00a0 If they don&#8217;t, ask.\u00a0 No one host can possibly keep up with the rate at which this technology is advancing.\u00a0 A responsible host will fall back on the combined research of organizations like the above.\u00a0 If your host is actually a member of one of them, all the better.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, what this means is to hang onto your hat.\u00a0 Cloud computing is something quite exciting.\u00a0 Nothing in this world is exciting, however, without at least a little sense of danger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The more that one looks into and considers what cloud computing is, the more it takes on an eerie quality.\u00a0 As integrated into our lives and even commonplace as the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":1995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[359,358,2497,3165,3163,2572],"class_list":["post-2751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-random-stuff","tag-cloud","tag-cloud-hosting","tag-cloud-security-alliance","tag-open-cloud-initiative","tag-open-data-center-alliance","tag-openstack"],"views":152,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}