Blocks has its head in the cloud

The great thing about the cloud is, unlike the mainframe, cloud processing can grow exponentially with your needs on demand.

By admin

When all computers were on mainframes Billy Gates had a vision to put a personal computer on the desk of every home. Great idea to capture both the PC and software market and it obviously worked, but it never really made sense and, as with all things, the pendulum has swung. Why install, upgrade and manage programs on computers if you can simply subscribe as needed, and for that matter why bother to upgrade your computer when the grunt work that new application consume can be done by idol computers with lots of power sitting idol in cyberspace. Wild huh!

Cloud computing is the latest ‘buzz word’ in IT circles and it’s concept is a ‘virtual mainframe’ where your computing is managed in ‘the cloud’ by computers somewhere on the web. The great thing about the cloud is, unlike the old mainframe, cloud processing can grow exponentially with your needs on demand.

Lets take the example of a start up company with an online store. They don’t yet know if the idea will be a success and as will all start ups cash is tight. Rather than investing in the infrastructure and IT staff to run it, the company can utilise a service like Amazon eC2 for processing and s3 for storage. The company pays for usage so if the servers are sitting idol and empty in early days there is no charge and then cost scales with success which is easy to budget for and absorb as an operating success. I guess this can also apply for any business during times where cash flow is tight.

Blocks SCT’s marketing platform also utilises cloud computing by farming out processes like image cropping to internal resources. This also means if for any reason these processes fail it will not effect the running of Blocks. There is also scope to farm out both the processing for Blocks and storage for those clients that want a ‘usage based’ fee.

The age article on cloud computing