Google Drive

Google Drive is an online collaboration tool that is free with Google Account and includes almost all basic microsoft office software. If you haven’t heard about or used this cloud device, you have to try it out. I use it every day, in multiple applications.

I work in a major corporation and because my department uses Macs, we are unable to utilize Sharepoint. We use Google Drive all day every day to work together and track necessary deliverables.

Recently my sister created a form using Google Drive so that her sorority sisters could recommend new pledges. The information submitted was automatically put into a spreadsheet where she could sort/count the information.

Google Drive is a great tool with working on group projects as well. You can even chat with other users in the document while working on documents. I use it at school to take notes on my iPad. In doing so, my notes are available to me anywhere on any device with an internet connection. Google Drive also has apps for tablets, phones and computers.

Have you been utilizing this tool as much as I have? If not, you should be!

Blog #3

Different types of Clouds

by: Alexander Ostwalt

Every time you look into the sky what do you see? A white blob, or white line, or a white turtle with a rabbit sitting on top of it. Clouds can be many shapes and sized, similarly there are different types of clouds in cloud computing. 

The first type is a public cloud. Just like the name, this type of cloud is open to everybody and can be accessed by anybody on a public internet. A public cloud can be used as storage or service applications. Public clouds can also be shared between others, like in school, in a business, between friends, groups of people, and others. Overall a public cloud is a very convenient in everyday lives or when working on a group assignment, but it is not necessarily convenient with businesses or organizations.

Which brings us to the second type of cloud, a private cloud. Just like the public cloud it can be shared with others, but the only thing about a private cloud, it is shared between people that you only allow access to. Private clouds lets people share and exchange information between a group or a business. All these group or businesses can use or also have access to two different types of private clouds. 

One is on-premise private cloud is also known as a "Internal Cloud", which is used within an organization or a business servers. On-premise private cloud can only be accessed by the people in the business or an organization building that they are in. Compared to public cloud, an on-premised private cloud needs to be run on your own hardware, storage, networking, and a cloud software.  

The second private cloud is an externally hosted private cloud, this is where a third-party cloud provider creates and takes responsibility for implementing, securing, and managing the cloud. A externally hosted private cloud is good with organization or a business that wants to keep their data at an offsite or a different location, but prefer not to use a public cloud. 

Then finally for the third type of cloud which is a hybrid cloud. With this type of cloud you can maintain systems in a data in-house using the public cloud while using the external services of a private cloud where some part will be in a off-site location for some application and processes. With a hybrid cloud you can keep your private information on a private cloud, but with anything else you can use the public cloud. Hybrid clouds are preferred between businesses and organization because its the best of both clouds. 

Work Cited:

http://randgroup.hubpages.com/hub/Three-Different-Types-of-Cloud

http://thecloudtutorial.com/cloudtypes.html

http://www.apexcloud.com/blog/types-of-cloud-computing-public-private-and-hybrid-clouds-explained

http://www.paranet.com/blog/bid/128265/The-Four-Types-of-Cloud-Computing-Models

Blog # 2

Journey of the Cloud

By: Chelsea Muckerman

Did you realize that the evolution of Cloud Computing started before most of our parents were born? In the 1950’s, time sharing was developed and allowed multiple users to interact with computers simultaneously using mainframe computers. Later, IBM took this idea one step further and began what we now refer to as Software as a Service (SaaS) based on mainframe.

Much, much later, in 1994, Magic Cap was introduced which was an operating system that made use of applications on low-powered handheld devices in communication with a network of computers via a cell phone link. While Magic cap was a short lived, it was this type of thinking that lead to today’s cloud.

Web 2.0 was born in the late 1990’s and in 1999 Salesforce.com was introduced. Salesforce.com was the first mainstream cloud-based SaaS success story and a few years later, in 2002, Amazon introduced Amazon Web Service. In 2006 Amazon launched Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a commercial web service which was the first widely accessible cloud computing infrastructure service.

The cloud began to affect the younger crowd in 1999 when Napster was founded and really took off in 2004 when Facebook launched and the social media craze began. Twitter jumped on board in 2006, followed by Instagram and Pinterest in 2010.

In 2009 Google launched Google Maps, which is connected to the Google cloud. Being connected to the cloud makes it possible for the software to provide the most up-to-date map data and it also provides live traffic data- which we all know is a huge bonus. Do you ever wonder what life was like before GPS?

2011 was the year that Cloud Computing truly took off and today there are a multitude of cloud computing companies spanning from anti-spam services to social media and GPS. When you check your emails through gmail, share pictures on dropbox or video chat on skype, you are already using a cloud-based software.  

Before you read this post, did you realize how often you used the cloud? I sure didn't.

Works Cited:

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/A-history-of-cloud-computing

http://sourcedigit.com/497-timeline-history-of-cloud-computing/

What is Cloud Computing?

By: Ryan Shoaf

Cloud computing is defined by Google as, “the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.” Through research, and exploration of this topic I found that I personally do not think cloud computing has a technical definition. I feel this way because, the term “Cloud Computing” is more of an expression that can be used for various types of computing concepts.

In cloud computing the term “cloud” is derived from the combination of networks, storage, hardware, interfaces, and services that come together to form a computing service. What attracts many individuals, and companies to cloud computing are its flexibility, and elasticity, which allows the resource allocation to get bigger, or smaller depending on demand. Along with flexibility, cloud computing allows self-service provisioning, standardized interfaces, and service usage metering. These key characteristics allow users to eliminate many complex constraints such as, space, power, cost, and time.

While cloud computing is used for various things, the main categories of cloud services include, Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (Paas), and Infrastructure as a service (Iaas). In cloud computing there are three types of clouds: A public cloud which are owned by companies, private clouds controlled by a single company, and a hybrid cloud which uses characteristics of a public cloud to create a private clouds that allows it to work with IT resources.

Work Cited:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=what+is+cloud+computing&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=what+is+cloud+computing&rls=en&safe=off

http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/what-is-cloud-computing.html

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/what-is-cloud-computing.html