We all know Steve Jobs is a great innovator. From the Apple II Series of the 1970s, one of the first personal computers, to the iPhone 4, he’s been able to advance technology in significant ways over five different decades. Yet even knowing all of this, he still manages to surprise me once in a while. Thanks to a Twitter friend, I discovered a YouTube video of Mr. Jobs explaining the value of cloud computing. I know, I know, big deal, we all know he’s an advocate of cloud computing. Well, this particular video is almost 15 years old.
Even in 1997, Steve Jobs knew that utilising cloud computing was going to be a huge step in our technologic development. Like the internet itself, cloud computing is one of those things that makes us wonder how we ever lived without it. This video begins with Mr. Jobs asking how many people back-up their computers, of course only one or two people put up their hands. Then he asks how many people have experienced hardware crashes that resulted in lost data and most of the audience admits they’ve lost data at some point. Today, in most offices, it’s harder to lose data than it is to back it up.
Data stored on shared servers is usually backed-up automatically. These servers have redundant drives, and any company with a sense of responsibility is doing another type of backup as well, a daily tape backup for example.
Data protection is not the only advantage of using a shared server. It can actually be faster to access a file stored on a server than on your own computer. Servers have faster hard drives, and if you’re accessing a commonly used file, it may be in the server’s ram storage, making it load to your computer at light speed, literally if you’re on a fibre network.
Mr. Jobs anticipated 14 years ago that faster connections and thin clients, which today are affordable and easy to use, would allow us to have a better and safer network infrastructure. He was right.
Tags: cloud computing, internet, shared server, steve jobs