The Past, Present and Future of Cloud Computing

Did you know the concept of sharing computing resources has been around since the era of mainframe computing which began in the 1950s and the term “cloud computing”, which is comparatively a modern term, was coined only in the last 10 years and back users were concurrently able to access and share a central system through various computers. It was realized by enterprises that since purchasing and maintaining computing capacity was so expensive, it made sense to share the resources for economical reasons. This is when the idea of sharing computing resources aka cloud computing came into picture. The concept of virtualization leads the way in the 1970s where several virtual computers ran on a single hardware, but this idea did not catch up early.

The very first milestone in cloud computing history took place in 1999 after the arrival of salesforce.com, which lead the way of delivering business applications through a website. This initiative by salesforce paved a way for specialist as well as mainstream software corporations to deliver apps on the internet. Soon after salesforce, Amazon came into picture and started working with cloud computing technology starting with AWS and launching their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Later on Google and Apple too adopted cloud technology which marked another major milestone and since then the cloud has been growing and evolving at a rapid rate. Then around 2005, businesses realized that it made more economic sense to buy shared computing resources from the cloud since it required lesser man hours and efforts and in turn had more capabilities and was inexpensive.

Cloud computing as a technology has existed for quite a long time now and the way enterprises have used it has been rapidly changing. It began as a simple hosting service and has evolved to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Looking at the present day scenario, large scale cloud computing is now accessible to everyone. It’s not just limited to big players in the market and now is open to anybody, anywhere. Cloud has now grown into a well-known approach for the management & deployment of applications for growing number of businesses.

Looking into the future, according to computer giant IBM, 2.5 billion gigabytes of data was generated every day in 2012. This data was generated by various industry verticals and consumers. For example, approximately 120 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute and about 200 million e-mails are exchanged every minute. A report, called ‘State of the Cloud Computing by Byron Deeter’, showed that the cloud computing market is growing at a 22.8% and the compound annual growth rate will reach $127.5 bn in 2018.

We live in a world where we are surrounded by a lot of gadgets and also, the number of IoT devices are growing as well. We now not only access information but we consume it to make decisions in real-time. This enormous size of data generated will also need to be collected together and processed in the Cloud. So, very soon cloud computing technology will allow us to work faster with more efficiency than it is today. In addition, together with their spread, our life will accelerate.

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Cloud Computing an Ideal need for Indian Smart Cities

When do we call a city ‘smart’? Investments made in human capital & technology enabling high quality life, economic development and management of natural resources through human engagement together comprises of a smart city. The definition of a smart city differs from state to state and city to city depending on willingness to change and level of development needed. Indian Government’s definition of a smart city is “Smart City offers sustainability in terms of economic activities and employment opportunities to a wide section of its residents, regardless of their level of education, skills or income level”. Under any Smart City there are certain services which needs to be assured like water and electricity supply, solid waste management and sanitation, public transport, safety and security, IT connectivity, smart parking and many other basic needs which the smart city addresses. 

 In a smart city there are various software’s and applications which connect, fetches and manages data from a set of devices such as sensors and software’s that generate real time information, intelligence and analytics which aims to transform the overall city. It is understood that there is enormous amount of heterogeneous data generated by the applications, but to handle such high capacity of data we need larger silos and high compute power, thus the latest developments in smart cities is the adoption of cloud computing.

Smart cities need to make use of various Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions to monitor functions in the city and also needs the capacity to manage and process this large scale data in real time in a specific manner. The cloud eases big data storage, integration, processing and analysis of data in certain time frame. There are various services on cloud which smart cities can use for their benefits in delivering the best in diverse business and technological domains by offering internet based service delivery that encourages creation of services which are based on domain independent service delivery platform. Cloud computing enhances sharpness, speed and cost savings by providing on demand access, through a network to a pool of shared computing resources which can be quickly provisioned and scaled as needed.

We can study the extent of cloud computing through the means of highly innovative and scalable service platforms through which smart city services can be enabled. Smart City deployment requires the incorporation of a distributed open source network and decentralized cloud based platform. The tailored IoT functionalities which will be provided by the cloud platform will permit several multi-sensor applications to perform complex big data processing through distributed sensor networks. In India the smart city mission consists of various plans which the government wants to execute which differs from city to city based on the level of improvements needed.  Rural and urban areas in India are targeted to transform into Smart Cities with a vision to provide ease in all day to day activities and to enhance quality of life and increase contact between citizens and government. Promoting the use of land for various purposes, expanding housing opportunities for all, promoting a variety of transport options, making governance citizen friendly and cost effective and giving an identity to a city, all these features are important for the development of a Smart City.

Cloud computing offers a big platform for Smart Cities and offer services which domain specific applications require and drive all system component design and determine most of the technical choices, ranging from smart devices to sensors to middleware components and computing infrastructure.

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How IoT Service Providers can maintain relevancy…

According to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report, there could be over 30 billion connected devices by 2023, of which around 20 billion will be related to the IoT. Connected IoT devices include connected cars, machines, meters, sensors, point-of-sale terminals, consumer electronics and wearables. According to Gartner, IoT can grow in terms of value over $1.9 by 2020, which includes the Business to Consumer as well as Business to Business market segments with verticals including smart cities, smart grids, smart homes, smart cars and wearable appliances.

What IOT does…

Sensing or controlling objects remotely across a network infrastructure is enabled by IoT, this bridges the gap between the digital world and the physical one, thus helping in improving efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit in addition to reduced human intervention. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated network of interconnected devices, gadgets, automobiles, buildings and other elements which exchange data with the help of software, sensors, actuators and network connectivity which enable these objects to share data and create actionable information systems which enable humans for better decision making.

IoT applications are being used across all business verticals. The smart transportation management, emergency services use the predictive maintenance, vehicle health monitoring and outage management system to manage their fleet and operations. Asset or Inventory Management, quality assurance and smart testing is being used in Industrial automations, Manufacturing, Energy and Utilities sectors. Data center and cloud service providers here play a major role in ensuring information intelligence safety and security while empowering complex programs churning out data management and analytics for comprehensive insights and forecasting. This not only ensures increased operational efficiency and productivity but also results into increased customer control with easy availability of real-time co-related information.

Marketplace

The IoT market is dissimilar and is likely to remain disintegrate in the short run. The CSPs need to adapt business vertical-based strategy, which delivers complete solutions without diluting their resources across a wide front. The most important game changer for them would be the scalability aspect and convergence. The solution needs to be designed to cover multiple business verticals including both B2B and B2C services. In order to be a one-stop-solution-hub CSPs will have to join hands with other ISVs and MSIs to broaden their business capabilities, particularly around bundling data processing services along with connectivity.

Scalability of Applications

The primary techno-commercial challenge that the CSPs face is with building IoT operations using their existing networks as many of the current legacy applications and systems are not horizontally scalable. End-to-end solutions will require seamless IoT device integration with the cloud which is only possible when the virtual machine is scalable vertically or the commercial unbalance spoils the game. A scalable security architecture is a must, including real-time traffic flow auditing with a per-per-consume billing model which ensures cost savings for a large part.

CSPs need IoT platform and solution partners to fast-track execution, propel innovation and promote convergence across their ultimate market scope. In order to bring a name for themselves, CSPs need to establish their brand and build a strong marketplace network within their targeted ecosystem. This might include B2B infrastructure owners, independent software vendors, manufacturers and OEMs amongst others.