Week 9- Cloud Computing

This week in class we looked at cloud computing and examples of it including Google Docs and bookmarking with Delicious.

Cloud computing in essentially using the storing material that you may normallykeep on your computers hard-drive on a "cloud" which has unlimited capacity. You work with this material, you must use the internet to get to it. Instead of paying for more servers which take time to hook up to power your work, cloud computing instantly hooks up as many servers you need to function. Some advantages of using cloud computing is that you only have to pay for what you're using. You also don't need high tech and costly computer to fun applications on since you are using the cloud to run them. you can also access any of the information on the cloud anywhere you are on any computer as long as it has internet. Some disadvantages are that occasionally the servers may go down and you may lose information if you don't have it backed up. Cloud computing may not be completely secure. If the internet connection is not working or is slow, it will be impossible or very difficult to access your work.

Cloud computing would be helpful in the telecommunication field. Tools such as google docs would help with collaborative projects which is a big part of my field. You may have to work with people who live in other states or even countries, so being able to all edit the same document/script on the computer and have the changes made show up on everyone's computer saves a lot of time and confusion. Also as a telecomm. major I will probably have a lot of videos and applications on my computer that take up a lot of space and slow down its performance. By using cloud computing, I can store video and run applications on the cloud which keeps my computer free to run at a high performance. I would just want to make sure I have my material stored on the cloud backed up somewhere else....just in case.

The video I found explains cloud computing and even compares it to Web 2.0 which we learned earlier in the semester. It also discuss cloud computing in terms of software as a service and hardware as a service as well as giving examples of each. It goes on to discuss how cloud computing can help smaller companies who don't have as much money to spend on expensive computers and applications. The guy narrating the video is a little funny in the way he talks to the camera, but if you can get pass that then the video is really informative.