Living In The Cloud

A new way of living is upon us. A new facet for our lives to occupy. More and more of us are living our lives online, storing very important aspects of ourselves and information about our lives on the Internet (a.k.a. “The Cloud”). Think about how much of your life is spent online, and how many services that only exist online know something about you… something important. How much have you researched online? How much have you bought online? How much have you banked online? More than you realized, I’d bet.

“Cloud Computing”

More and more services online are competing for our lives. They are asking us to invite our friends, store our documents, entertain us, and streamline our lives. What’s more they aren’t just asking to do it, they’re actually making our lives better, providing a return on our “investment of information.” I can say without a doubt that online services make my life easier and more convenient. On the flip side, they also add clutter. However, once you figure out how you work best online it becomes somewhat easy to cut out the clutter and actually simplify things.

Think about these services for a moment… How many of them have you had to install on your computer? How many of them are available offline? Hardly any. They only exist or make themselves available when you are connected to the Internet and because of this you are drawn into the Internet more and more.

The future of marketing, software, services, and products

This is where it gets interesting. Many of the leaders of these services are developing vast data centers using cheap hardware on cheap or free operating systems. Companies like Google, Yahoo!, IBM and Microsoft are moving very quickly to create the facilities to enable and store the services and data that allow people to function in the cloud. Because of this, the ability to find computing power and data storage online is becoming extremely cheap and ubiquitous. It’s actually becoming very much like a utility for companies that take advantage of these data centers in the cloud. Amazon, for instance, has two offerings in particular that they call the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). These can be used by software engineers and .com start-ups to host virtually unlimited amounts of data and virtual computing power. They can turn them off and on as needed and only pay for what is used…and it literally costs just pennies.

As these services become better and more available people are flocking to use them. Companies like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube have attracted people in droves, and keep them engaged. That means that more marketing and advertising dollars must follow. We are only beginning to see what context-based and pay-per-transaction advertising will become. The media game is changing and it will be interesting to see how media buying and selling changes with it. There is tremendous opportunity within this transformation to change the old crusty advertising industry.

How StudioNorth is taking advantage of “The Cloud”

At StudioNorth we are very highly aware of how to use the cloud to help our clients. We use it to host high traffic/high bandwidth “components” of websites. Components like videos that are attached to direct marketing campaigns. We are also using the cloud to create the future of our agency service offerings. It’s very cost effective for us and highly scalable. We’ve always been a custom online software application agency, but now we are able to offer much more. Automating and moving some of our core processes into the cloud to achieve usage and reach audience we’ve never thought possible before is very exciting and rewarding.

So…

As Sun Microsystems used to say back in the 1990’s, “The Network is the Computer.” It wasn’t then, but it is fast becoming true today (too bad Google and Adobe are eating Sun’s lunch). Only the future will show for sure how far the cloud boundary will permeate our lives. And once it has, what’s next?

-Andy

Some references for more info.

Wikipedia: Cloud Computing
Advertising Age: What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast
O’Reilly: The Network REALLY is The Computer

Andy leads the interactive offerings and staff engineers at StudioNorth. He consults with clients on strategic technology direction and personally oversees the key phases of the iterative development cycle for many large technology projects. Whether for public web sites, private extranets, or custom applications, Andy uses his rich experience to provide results-driven solutions to our clients. He’s known for being a visionary and for coining the phrase, “conservative wow” in reference to StudioNorth’s ability to create high-impact projects for some of our more conventional audiences. If you want to bring your brand beyond “2.0″, Andy is your connection.

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