It wasn’t too terribly long ago that if someone told you you had your head up in the clouds they were really telling you that you were dreaming of the impossible. Or possibly, just dreaming instead of working. Now, being in the clouds may be exactly the place where you should be. Making the decision to learn about cloud computing can be the beginning of a new career for an individual, or the a complete expansion of the abilities of an entire company.
Cloud computing consists of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than simply using a local server or a personal computer. It has transformed nearly every major industry in our country. From the amateur photographer looking for a way to store and access the hundreds of thousands of photos for friends and family to the banking industries that must find additional and more secure storing options, cloud computing services have been transforming the entire data industry.
Large and small data center companies across America and the world exist to help manage this process. Nearly 42% of IT decision makers were planning to increase spending on cloud computing in 2015. In fact, by the year 2018, more than 60% of all enterprises will have at least half of their infrastructure on cloud-based platforms. As these increases occur, more and more people will be needed to learn about cloud computing and the implications and future possibilities that it will have.
Whether you are a beginning computer engineering major just out of high school, or whether you are currently on the staff of a small IT company looking to expand its services, making the decision to learn about cloud computing will become a process that may never end. Just as one industry thinks that they have a new platform for web services using the cloud, another company will take a leap beyond that platform to another use.
We are a country made of data. Infinite amounts of data that run everything from our airport security systems to web services for every educational and health services provider in America. As a nation that relies on all of this data, it is imperative that all of these entities have backup disaster recovery solutions in place. All of these recovery locations rely on cloud data storage.
Forbes magazine recently reported that 80% of small businesses will soon rely on cloud computing for the efficiency, accessibility and cost-effectiveness of this technology. How far are you into the cloud? You can never learn too much about cloud computing because no matter where you are at in the learning process you still have a long way to go in this ever expanding technology.