PSISeptember2018

TRENDS
The rise of the Cloud
PSI talks to Kim Loy, Director of Technology and Communications,
Vanderbilt about the growing popularity and use of cloud services
The cloud has radically reshaped our day-today
lives and is increasingly accepted as a
highly convenient means for storing and
accessing data, as well as offering valuable
services and applications. Cloud services have
become well established across almost all
industry sectors and changing customer demands
mean that many businesses are now reinventing
their offerings to harness the power, flexibility
and functionality it offers.
Cloud: A brief history
Although the cloud is one of the most heavily
talked about topics in technology right now, the
concept has been around for many years -
decades even. In the early 1960’s, an American
computer scientist named John McCarthy
developed the notion of time-sharing. This initial
thought process ultimately kick-started the
pattern development that would lead to today’s
polished version of cloud-sharing.
During the 1970s and 1980s, email and the
original giants of computing like Microsoft, Apple,
Oracle and Dell entered the scene. However, it
was the arrival of the internet in the 1990s, and
the significant bandwidth that this development
offered, that truly delivered a concrete
springboard to flesh out McCarthy’s original
thesis and deliver the cloud to the world.
One of the first on the march to cloud
computing was the arrival of Salesforce in 1999.
Salesforce delivered enterprise applications
through a simple website and ultimately carved a
path for software firms to distribute applications
via the internet.
The next landmarks were Amazon Web
Services in 2002 and Google Apps in 2009. As
leading technology companies began to deliver
easy-to-use services, the development of mobile
internet devices soon normalised the idea of the
cloud to the wider masses. The adoption of
smartphones created the opportunity for cloudbased
applications in security to exist, as well.
Adoption in business and
security
The adoption of cloud-based solutions by
companies continues to grow at an astonishing
rate. Cisco predicts that by 2020, global cloud use
will account for more than 92 percent of total data
centre traffic. This surge in adoption also
represents a huge uptake in spending, which
The adoption of cloud-based solutions by companies
continues to grow at an astonishing rate. Cisco predicts
that by 2020, global cloud use will account for more than
92 percent of total data centre traffic
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