The Cloud is as much of a technological innovation, as it is a business one.
Back in 2015, my uncle started his pizza restaurant, Kindles in Marlborough, MA. This was shortly before the Cloud was widely adapted in industry. He went ahead and bought a Point of Sale (PoS) system to collect customer orders, which consisted of a computer (imagine a 2007 Windows PC without a monitor) connected to the purchases from his register. Today, we have a need to dress up everything in technical jargon, so it would now be referred to as software with self-hosted infrastructure.
In 2018, I was working for Oracle Cloud as a Solutions Engineer, and my uncle called me because his PoS system told him he needed to buy yet another computer to save customer orders, since his current one was running out of memory. This presented a major issue as he didn’t have the space in his restaurant for additional hardware nor did he want to spend hundreds of dollars on equipment costs and electricity bills. Here’s where “The Cloud” comes in.
Instead of using an old system that requires self-hosted infrastructure (literal computers that you need to store in your house/restaurant/business), companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle have created massive warehouses of computers to store your software for you. This fixed my uncle’s problem as he could just borrow space on one of Amazon’s computers rather than needing to purchase the additional equipment.
Check out this map: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/. This map contains the location of every Amazon Web Service (AWS) “Availability Zone”, which are the aforementioned massive computer warehouses. This IS the Cloud.
Going back to my uncle, his first response to my suggestion was “what about security?” This concern is understandable, and as is often noted, even people in the tech industry are often worried about data security within the Cloud.
I told him that his computer was currently taking up space on the floor of his restaurant even though it was not actively secured. The only difference from his current setup versus “The Cloud” was that the computer sat in Marlborough, but when software is migrated to the Cloud, the computer hosting his software would be in a warehouse in Virginia. In fact, in the Cloud facility in Virginia, there is support staff monitoring and applying regular security updates, which would mean much stronger security than he had currently! He decided to move to the Cloud, and he’s happily hosted his data there since.
Don’t get me wrong, the Cloud has some very impressive software features, and my description is a massive simplification of what’s actually happening. However, when described in its most literal form, it’s just a bunch of computers sitting in a basement.