Cloud Computing

What is the next step after having physical hardware on your premises? What can better than desktop and server virtualization? There is one new type of alternative that has become the ‘ talk around the camp fire’.

Cloud computing is the ability of user to be able to access IT resources such as data, software and even control hardware through wireless and LAN networks. What happens is that a user will send a request using a computer with only a high-speed Internet wit minimal hardware resources and very little software, for a word processing program, to a service provider.  Once this request has been seen and accepted the user will be able to run the application and use it to do anything task that he wishes to do and even save the information on the web.

With this efficient way of using applications whilst using minimal hardware to perform tasks, cloud computing becomes a very powerful tool for institutions. IT will effectively allow these institutions to be able to increase and add capabilities on the go with having to spend funds on creating a new infrastructure for their organization, training new employees and one of the most important factors, licensing new software with the amounts of students certain institutions may have. The only real costs that this service could incur are a subscription based pay service that an institution will have to subscribe to using an IP-based login over the Internet.

I feel that this is a great alternative for Limkokwing. IT will significantly reduce costs across a wide range of resources that the university requires for certain faculties such as Creative Multimedia and the Architectural Faculty. Both these faculties require a large amount of powerful workstations and lots of licensed software.

Now if implemented even the issues of storage costs in datacenters will be reduced and the need for more datacenters to accommodate storage of data will be greatly reduced. All the costs can now be done by allowing a third party take care of the data on a secure private cloud server.

With cloud computing, each student is able to, as in desktop virtualization and server virtualization, access all their data from home or one the go with a assigned temporarily login or student ID.