Choosing the topic
I am interested to learn about the invention of cloud technology and how it revolutionalised the way we work today.
I personally anticipate that cloud technology will become an integral part of technology, deeply entrenched within our systems such that we will, in the next 2 decades, be unable to imagine our lives without it. I chose this because cloud technology has only emerged roughly 10 years ago as a purely experimental research topic, yet today it is increasingly involved in many avenues, and we continue to find ways to improve the technology.
Outline
Executive summary
The paper will cover the background of cloud technology, its applications today and how it has revolutionized the way we work today. We explore its strengths and weaknesses and how it has aided the rise of cloud computing. We then explore possible solutions and anticipate changes in the landscape of the near future.
Background
Cloud technology is today widely used as it removes infrastructure and capital expense as barriers of entry. This is a great plus point to small startups. Cloud technology is reinventive in itself. It will continue to unleash innovations and bring new innovations and efficiencies to businesses.
Wikipedia: "In early 2008, Eucalyptus became the first open-source, AWS API-compatible platform for deploying private clouds"
Historical perspective
The underlying concept of cloud computing dates back to the 1950s, when large-scale mainframe became available in academia and corporations, accessible via thin clients / terminal
computers. Because it was costly to buy a mainframe, it became
important to find ways to get the greatest return on the investment in
them, allowing multiple users to share both the physical access to the
computer from multiple terminals as well as to share the CPU time, eliminating periods of inactivity, which became known in the industry as time-sharing
Current situation
Today, many innovators such as Apple, Samsung have incorporated cloud technology into their devices. Many subscribe to the ecosystem of devices eg Apple with iPads, iPhones and iMacs which are seamlessly connected. Samsung has hosted content of mobile phones including contacts, game data into clouds. This enables a user to restore directly their content into a brand new phone. (The easing up of switching to the next best smartphone is a great move for Samsung, in my opinion.)
The use of cloud computing utility has increased significantly in recent
years and it appears to be a natural evolution of the data centre to execute
computing and storage in a more scalable way. With such a significant increase,
the market is growing quickly and more companies are providing new services
with better features, including isolated services. We strongly believe that in
the near future, cloud computing will be widely used in the healthcare sector.
Several companies are already adopting this kind of solution, offering PACS and
RIS services in private clouds.
Medical images are very important records, and so the storage repository needs
redundancy to be a reliable system. Cloud providers offer this data security
and backup system without any worries or additional charges for customers.
Medical institutions can reduce the costs of local storage maintenance with
PACS archive outsourcing. Moreover, outsourcing is an opportunity for small
image centres that purchase modality equipment, despite not having the
financial resources to buy software and hardware to keep up a PACS repository
as it grants a redundancy/ backup system.
For your comments please! :)
Hey Ke Ming :)
ReplyDeleteI found your outline very comprehensive and informative.
I have only one suggestion: In your introduction/background, instead of just writing about why cloud technology is used, maybe you can include a brief description on what cloud technology is and how cloud computing actually works :)
-Namratha
HI KEMING!
ReplyDelete1) I think you can expand on your future perspective a bit more - give possible scenarios on how cloud technology would be deeply entrenched in our daily lives, envisage how it can potentially benefit us if the technology manages to get rid of its limitations that it currently faces (does it have any?)
2) Maybe you can break down the "current situation" a bit to be more specific on what you are trying to focus on. Like I'm sure the impacts cloud technology has on our current world are multi-faceted and varied, maybe you can look at these aspects individually e.g. the revolutionary impact it has in terms on cost-saving, generation of wealth, saving of resources etc. I think the basic ideas are all there, just that it's quite hard to sieve out (or maybe it's cause this is just an outline!)
3) I agree with Namratha on elaborating on what cloud technology is and how it actually works before diving into the paper. I confess I'm still damn lost on what it is even after all the discussion about it in class hahah xD so maybe it would help and make your paper easier to read if you start off with a general introduction!
That's all!
Happy CNY!! See you in class soon
- Chang Ning