Cloud Computing and What It Means for Mobile
What at first sounds like a John Carpenter flick is actually the latest catchphrase from an industry that seems to churn one out every few weeks. "The Cloud" is the high-tech world’s way of simplifying the intricate network of thousands of computers that provide access to applications, services and even platforms over the internet – instead of having them reside in your computer or mobile device. As a corollary, "Cloud Computing" is computing work that you’ve "outsourced" from your PC to a company with thousands of PCs, such as Google. Instead of having your PC and its meager resources do actual word processing, for example, you’re letting Google and its acres of data centers do the work for you through its Google Docs service, freeing up your computer for other functions.
"The Cloud" and "Cloud computing" are just new terms for a concept that many of us are already familiar with, at least from a consumer’s perspective. Flickr and Multiply users, for example, make use of cloud-based storage for their pictures. Some hefty applications, such as Customer Relationship Management software, which takes months or even years to implement on a company’s servers, can now reside fully within ‘The Cloud’ and be accessed by company staff from literally any computer or mobile device.
Within the mobile space, however, the implications of Cloud Computing are just being realized. Apple has opened the floodgates for the popular use of internet-based applications such as banking, utility and news iPhone apps – which allow you to be productive anytime and anywhere there is a mobile or Wi-Fi connection. As mobile computing power grows, so too will the capabilities of mobile apps, which will eventually be able to replicate the robustness and performance of its desktop counterparts. ABI Research, in a recently-launched study of mobile Cloud Computing , sees exactly this scenario of ’unprecedented sophistication’ for mobile apps in the near future.
There is no doubt that Cloud Computing’s upside – the centralization of computing resources, its accessibility, scalability and customizability, plus the benefits of resource optimization and reliability - is tremendous. However, one can reap the benefits only if one has access to the actual services. Unfortunately, in our ‘always-on’ world, internet connectivity, particularly for mobile devices, isn’t always reliable or affordable.
For mobile cloud computing services to really take off, we need cheap bandwidth, which may only be addressed once higher-speed networks such as LTE are launched by US carriers in the next 2 to 4 years. When these connectivity issues are resolved, though, we may see Eric Schmidt’s 1993 prediction come true a second time: “When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer (or in this case, the mobile) hollows out and spreads across the network.”
