The Evolution of the Cloud

As early as the 1950’s, a man named Herb Grosch envisioned that the world would eventually operate on terminals which would be powered by less than 20 data centres. 65 years later, we grow ever closer to realising the vision of a man who knew speed was a pivotal principle for the future of the economy.

Cloud storage is a concept that has been portrayed in very complicated ways, especially in the media, which jokes about storage facilities in the skies above our heads. Despite the name, the storing of data will always require a physical location, but is currently accessible by use of the internet, which was developed as a file sharing mechanism in the 80’s.

The first link between computers served a very simple purpose. To ‘send’ data from one computer to another without the need for the movement of a physical storage device. Back in the days of floppy discs and hard drives the size of houses, data could become damaged and lost forever in a flash of lightning or the lid of your pop bottle coming loose in your school bag.

Since the explosion of the internet in the last few decades, people have made demands for increased speed. Bigger, better connections provide data faster with less loading times and the technological advances that we have made especially since the turn of the century have allowed us to move beyond storage that exists only on your computer.

These faster upload and download times would quickly become a problem. The more data that could be transferred, the more space would be required to hold it. For companies with users accessing the same data from different points it would be an exercise in paying out for expensive storage for their clients and users, and also the time needed to provide them. There was a way forward.

Governments were first to realise the benefits of being able to access data held in other locations across the world, and agencies began to develop computer ‘grids’ which would allow the sharing of resources via internet connections, thus reducing costs phenomenally by cutting out the need to prepare and dispatch physical data in the form of CDs or DVDs.

Amazon were the first large company to adopt ‘Cloud Services’, which allowed organisations to buy physical space to run their applications. It wasn’t until the year after, in 2007 that an MIT student founded Dropbox, a company that still exists today to supply cloud storage to the ‘every day person’.

Now, so many companies have adopted and use cloud services that the future is beginning to look increasingly as Herb Grosch had imagined. An economic world which accesses and operates entirely out of and from it’s connectivity. Whether there will be so many companies offering cloud services in the future – we cannot know, but with technology advancing as it is, the idea that the space needed to hold our information will decrease in time is a probability that we can be sure of, even if we cannot predict it’s end.