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Dr. Rob Rennie
Chief Information Officer
Rob has been a CIO for over twenty years and is known for building the reputations of... More
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So, about that CLOUD thing…
Posted by Dr. Rob Rennie Wed, July 20, 2011 1:07 pm EDT
You have no doubt read or heard about the cloud, as in cloud computing or cloud apps. If you weren't wondering what it was or how it might affect your digital life before the Apple WWDC announcements by Steve Jobs, you likely have wondered since.
First off, let’s clear up what cloud is. Think of cloud as a computing utility where you select the computing services and functionality that you want and pay either a flat fee per use or per user for the services you need. In our college environment we have had over 200,000 active accounts in the cloud for a few years. Specifically, all student accounts have been on Google and/or Microsoft for around five years and we use a variety of other hosted and/or cloud-like services provided by off-premise service providers. Done well you shouldn’t have to know the provider of the resource.
Although I am primarily referring to the enterprise environment, you probably have used clouds yourself, such as Dropbox, YouTube, Vimeo or some similar service. Apple’s recent announcements of cloud services are truly exciting and should result in significant quality improvements our personal digital lives. As for their full effect on our enterprise environments-it is too soon to tell.
