THE precipitation of vast amounts of data to from the Cloud to mobile devices and computer everywhere is what opened up the 4th Industrial Revolution, and kicked off the New Age of Digitalization as we know it today. This massive uploading, transfer, storage and downloading of data via the Internet was created because of the fear of a nuclear disaster from the Cold War.
The concept of the Cloud, credited initially to American Scientist John McCarthy who popularized the idea of “time-sharing”–the “sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.” It was Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, then working with the U.S. Defense Department, was working towards and helping develop the first public packet-switched computer network, created Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). ARPANET had one objective: designed quickly share information, in the event of a nuclear attack.
When ARPANET was decommissioned it was left in the hands of academics and researchers, the most notable are scientists Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn who developed the protocol now known as TCP/IP or the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. The Internet as we know it today operates on this set of guidelines that will take charge of taking data, putting them into little containers called packets and transporting them where they need to go. To do this, the Internet Protocol (IP) is requires so the packets know where to go. The seemingly simple system is a complex array of calls and actions including unpacking the data when it arrives. Without TCP/IP the Internet, and the Cloud would not have happened.
Starting around 1981, at UCLA and Standford, where the sparks of the Internet began in 1969, the methods of TCP/IP were being perfected to such granularity that the separation of packets of data became faster and the transmission only limited by the copper network at that time. The reassembly of that data also became more accurate and even quicker. It was in 1981 that the concept and term “Cloud” came to be part of the information technology jargon.
In about the same decade, Canadian electrical engineer Douglas F. Parkhill, predicted that the computers could be linked up creating a network that would become publicly available and useful, much like water or electricity. It would be distributed and can link users, even remotely located ones “are connected links to a central computing facility.” He wrote about this in his 1966 book The Challenge of the Computer Utility.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, said that the development of the World Wide Web begun 20 years later when scientist Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland created the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), “which standardized communication between servers and clients. Their text-based Web browser was made available for general release in January 1992.”
The movement from pulse (electrical or analog telephony) to tone (or data) threw the doors open for TCP/IP and eventually the Internet. The introduction of fiber-optic technologies further opened up the development of the Cloud, along with mobile devices that began to operate more like computer than telephones. With fiber-optics, the “virtualization” of computing began.
The term “virtualization” is the creation of a virtual machine that behaves like a real computer and has a fully functional operating system. Since businesses began offering “virtual” private networks as a service that could be rented, the concept of virtualization has developed alongside the internet. The modern cloud computing infrastructure was created as a result of the widespread use of virtual computers in the 1990s.
As businesses gained a better understanding of the cloud’s services and utility, it gained popularity. Salesforce became a well-known illustration of cloud computing’s success in 1999. They pioneered the idea of delivering software to end users via the Internet by using it. Anyone with access to the Internet could access and download the program or application. The software could be purchased by businesses without having to leave their offices in a cost-effective way on demand.
Amazon debuted its web-based shopping services in 2002. It was the first significant company to consider employing barely 10% of its capacity, which was typical at the time, as a challenge. They were able to utilize their computer’s capability far more effectively thanks to the cloud computing infrastructure paradigm. Other major businesses quickly adopted their strategy.
Amazon introduced Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006, which provides online services to other websites or customers. Its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), allows users to “rent” virtual computers and use applications available on the Amazon Marketplace where the availability of software and applications–ranging from website building to artificial intelligence is easily available. Amazon Mechanical Turk, another offers a variety of cloud-based services, including storage, computation, and “human intelligence.”
AWS is significant in the way it democratized the Internet via the Cloud providing both access and technology. Every year since 2006, AWS has introduced a major shift in the Cloud–
For 2021 it made available to the Philippines AWS Outposts a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any customer datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Outposts is a response to the pandemic initiated remote working set-ups and is ideal for applications that need to run on-premises to meet low latency requirements.
Outposts is made to process and manage data locally and effectively meet to meet data residency requirements.
In 2012, Oracle launched the Oracle Cloud, which pivoted on three services. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SAAS (Software as a Service). Oracle, the last of the big wigs to migrate to the Cloud because its customers were mostly on-prem also became the most innovative. In November 2016, Oracle acquired NetSuite for approximately US$9.3 billion. The resulting Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit became the lesson platform for Oracle movement into the Cloud. Oracle-Netsuite is currently managed by Executive Vice President Evan Goldberg. It is branded as “Oracle’s Cloud ERP for Small and Mid-sized Enterprises with the ability to scale to Fortune 500 firms.”
Cloud operations were done on publicly available access points via data centers. This made public Cloud vulnerable to security risks, which is why data-sensitive institutions avoid it.
Banks in particular, because of both data sovereignty and data security kept to their own on-premise mainframes. The private Cloud was initiated in 2008. In the beginning they were undeveloped, and expensive, thus not very popular. But companies like AWS, Microsoft, and OpenStack had developed private clouds that were extremely developed, automated and fully functional. In then start-up known as OpenStack made an open-sourced, free, do-it-yourself Cloud, which became very popular, and an inspiration to bigger Cloud enterprises, which also led to the development of the hybrid Cloud.
Hybrid Clouds, as the name implies, works with both on-premise and Cloud-bases systems wherein a interoperability is needed between both the private and public Clouds. The ability to shift workloads back and forth between the two Clouds was crucial and only big enterprises were able to do it. Today because of companies like SAP, Oracle or IBM hybrid Cloud systems are very popular even to SMEs.
When businesses started using SaaS providers for certain services like supply chain management, human resources management, and customer relations management, they started using multi-clouds. Around 2013 and 2014, this started to gain popularity. Despite the fact that this use of SaaS providers is still quite common, there has developed a philosophy of using multiple clouds for their distinct services and advantages.
By 2019, Cloud computing’s fundamental features had been developed leading to more spectacular features like artificial intelligence and machine learning operating. With both privacy and security emerging as major concerns, security in the Cloud is now a service that is expanding quickly. In the past few years, Cloud security has made significant progress and now offers protection comparable to that of traditional IT security systems.
This includes preventing the accidental deletion, theft, and data leakage of important data.
Having said that, the majority of cloud users’ primary concern is, and may always be, security.
The use of the internet for Lazada, Shopee and Amazon, as well remote work increasing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic will put a lot of stress on Cloud infrastructure. IBM suggests that AI as a strong catalyst for the Cloud’s future, and that automated data governance software will be used to deal with the growing number of Internet laws and regulations.
