The evolution and impact of cloud computing
Cloud computing provides computing services over the internet, replacing traditional hardware procurement and integration. It gained momentum after the global financial crisis in 2008, offering increased productivity and efficiency. Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud are key players, enabling innovative consumer business models like Netflix, and benefiting enterprises and governments through improved resource management.
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Jeremy Gleeson: So, very simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service, rather than as a product.
Once upon a time, if you were a business and you wanted to increase the amount of computer capacity you had, you would have had to go and buy that hardware. You would have had to buy the networking equipment to connect that hardware to your corporate infrastructure, and you probably would have ended up employing the services of either a third party or some of your own employees to do all of that integration work for you.
Now, cloud computing is effectively a term that can be used to define a computing-like infrastructure, which can be used in the internet.
So, cloud computing has really developed over the last couple of decades; [it] started to really achieve widespread adoption in the wake of the global financial crisis, when companies around the world needed to enhance their productivity and efficiency and effectively do more with less.
So, one of the pioneers in this space was a company called Amazon. Amazon launched something called Amazon Web Services or AWS, and they are still a leader in this market today. Microsoft would be regarded as sort of the second player in the space and as a fast follower. And Alphabet with their Google Cloud platform, are seen as the number three, and all three companies are growing their cloud computing services at a very healthy rate.
So, you could argue that it’s been the emergence of cloud computing that has enabled many of the new consumer business models that thrive today, such as Netflix and Spotify. But the be biggest beneficiaries of cloud computing have really been the enterprises and governments, due to better resource management in cloud computing, that cloud computing enables these institutions to enjoy.
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