This piece suggests a Linux cloud hosting VPS (virtual private server) to accelerate your company with cloud computing. However, what’s exciting about the cloud is not specific solutions, but how its speed and agility will change all of our lives, so we will explore that topic. Here’s our basic outline:

Introduction: Scope of the cloud

We hear that the cloud is fast. We hear that it’s cheap. We hear that it’s the future of everything from development (okay, sure) to personal computing (yeah, maybe) to security (wow).
In January, Jack Woods of SiliconAngle compiled statistics from various research sources into a simple report that ended up being probably one of the most widely cited cloud articles of the year (and we’ve referenced it in this blog repeatedly).

Note: The Woods article would be more helpful if it cited original source material rather than other publications and even its website. Nonetheless, the information appears to be legitimate.
Here are five quick stats that define the scope of the cloud:

  1. The market for business and consumer cloud solutions (as a total figure) could exceed $180 billion by 2015 (InformationWeek).
  2. Although the cloud is virtual, it still needs hardware to operate. The market on distributed virtual hardware is forecast to hit $79.1 billion in 2018.
  3. American businesses will pay out over $13 billion for cloud environments and management packages during 2014 (CIOZone).
  4. Everyone knows that the cloud is replacing legacy systems. Between 2014 and 2019, the workload performed by cloud providers will grow 44% per year (compounded), versus only a 9% rise for in-house server workloads (Barron’s).
  5. Four out of five firms (82%) cut their costs via cloudification (NSK Inc.).

Wall Street Journal: The entrepreneurial era

Technology moves so quickly that online information seems to become almost immediately outdated. If a study or report wasn’t completed in the last couple of years, it’s typically tossed aside as irrelevant. We have new cloud predictions for 2015, after all!

However, there is an excellent 2011 report by the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Mullich (covered, in part, twice previously), which predicted the following cloud impacts:

Doctor-middleware-patient relationship

A trend that was already evident in 2011 is assumedly continuing to grow in prominence. Between 2010 and 2011, there was a significant shift from standard Internet access to mobile app use for information-gathering among medical students: Web browsers declined to 33% from 52%, while mobile applications rose to 34% from 19%.

Dan Shey of ABI Research notes that medical decision-making becomes nearly immediate when healthcare providers are “able to pull up a patient’s radiograph and zoom into particular areas… with the touch of a button.” The speed of the cloud combines with the nature of touch-screen mobile devices to allow doctors to access, zoom, and navigate images without a wait.

Health in the house

Along with patient care in the office and medical research, the cloud improves health in the home as well. Honorio J. Padrón III of consultancy the Hackett Group noted the growing field of home health monitoring. For instance, anyone who has sleep apnea can now be gauged wirelessly, with data amassed throughout the night. The system is, in turn, connected to a community of specialists to craft a treatment strategy.

Pre-industrial straight to the cloud

Developing countries such as China and Brazil can enter the cloud more rapidly because they don’t have well-developed legacy infrastructure. In other words, the challenge of migrating applications, integrating systems, and figuring out hybrid solutions is not as much of a concern as for the US, UK, etc.

This general trend of globalization, in which a society jumps over an entire phase of a technology, is called leapfrogging. A perfect example is India, which went straight to cell phones, skipping mass adoption of landlines.

Diversification of supply

Until the cloud came along, it made sense for enterprises to use a limited quantity of suppliers simply for efficiency. However, the range of suppliers could broaden as firms can find viable solutions on the fly.

Community clouds could allow various organizations to do business through a mutually agreeable platform (generally stunted but could progress).

Now entering the entrepreneurial era.

One major shift – due to the ability to collaborate with other individuals and develop software affordably and quickly – is seeing more entrepreneurs carve out niches for themselves. The co-chair of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, John Hagel, said that the sophisticated testing to which startups immediately have access is incredible, with the rate of innovation accelerating in tandem with “the speed at which you can identify what people are interested in, and what they will pay.”

Voice recognition

Finally, the cloud has injected power into the ability of speech-to-text applications to accurately transcribe a vast pool of users.

Atlantic.Net: Linux VPS hosting in the cloud

Now that we have discussed some broader possibilities of the cloud let’s briefly consider one way to get started: a Linux VPS from Atlantic.Net. Basic characteristics include the following:

  • Reliability and performance of the cloud
  • Less expensive than a dedicated environment
  • Keeps you agile in a similar manner to shared hosting
  • Allows direct SSH access.

Spin up your own budget-friendly cloud server now: it takes just 30 seconds to get started. Cloud hosting is just one of several services that Altantic.net offers – we also offer managed, dedicated hosting and PCI compliant hosting. Contact us today for a consultation.

By Kent Roberts