Page 16 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

INTRODUC TION

users in all sorts of unforeseen ways, finally becoming an all-
enveloping embrace.
Have you been bumped into recently by someone walking
down the street who is so absorbed in his iPhone or some other
electronic device that he can’t be bothered to notice the traf-
fic around him? Well, it’s going to get a lot worse. The range

and depth of digital services that will flow out of the cloud will
be more engaging than those currently available. Within a year,
even the most detached observer will say that a fundamental
shift is underway, with the human culture that’s captured on
the display of a small digital device being primary and other
influences, such as education, literature, fine arts, and film,
being secondary. Even skeptics will concede, most of them

disapprovingly, that a revolution of historic proportions is tak-
ing place.
It will be hard to know how to position your company in
the face of this inexorable, omnipresent shift to a more intense
digital culture. But with an understanding of what the cloud is
all about and how it’s likely to evolve, it will be possible to form
a strategy for survival and advancement in the coming era.
As we shall explore in this book, at its heart, the cloud is
a shift in how end users will do the bulk of their computing.

It’s assumed at this early stage that “services that previously
resided in the client, including e-mail, photo and video stor-
age and office applications” will move off the PC device and
into the cloud, according to a paper by Google’s leading data
center engineers. One needs only to look to MySpace, flickr,
YouTube, and Facebook to see that such a shift is already
underway.

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