The Cloud

This is a term you often hear thrown around. “Our data is in The Cloud”. Sounds kind of futuristic doesn’t it. But here’s the thing. The “Cloud” has been around since the 1950’s.  

That’s right. Old technology with a new name. (My issue with naming things with clever nicknames, as opposed to what they actually are, is that it causes confusion and misconceptions. A topic for another time perhaps.)

Back in the 50’s many financial institutions had large mainframe computer installations. These were used for processing their respective financial data. At some point, it was determined that many of these installations were underutilized. The idea was to make money off of the installation by sharing its resources with other businesses that could not afford the major investment in their own mainframe computer installations, but still needed some computer processing capabilities.

The information would typically be communicated between the computer installation and the end user clients via the existing telecommunications infrastructure.  In many cases specialized lines were developed by the phone companies to insure more stable data transfers. 

Here is a link that explains this in more detail.
A Brief History of Cloud Computing | IBM

Fast forward to today. No change really, other then the addition of wireless technology and advancements in software to allow sharing resources across separate installations. The “Cloud”, is still reliant on the existing telecommunications network. 

So, your data is not floating out in space somewhere, but more likely in a big data center in a cornfield in Nebraska.