Lexington, KY - How much easier would your professional and personal life be if you were able to access all of your data at any given moment from any computer on earth? What if you could organize and mine information from any online source and share it - documents, e-mail, charts, graphs, photos, movies, whatever - with your co-workers, customers, colleagues, friends and family instantly?
This is the promise of personal cloud computing. It is growing in popularity and being pushed along by necessity and the need to lower operating costs and cut energy use and waste - not to mention how much more convenient it is.
Most of us are already using cloud-based services. E-mail is a case in point.
"Many of us use Yahoo or Google e-mail, for example, but none of the e-mail we send or receive is stored on our computers. It is stored on Yahoo's or Google's servers," said Devanathan
Sudharshan, a management and marketing professor and the former dean of the Gatton College of Business at the University of Kentucky.
"What 'cloud' literally means is that the information being used is away from your local machine and therefore can be accessed by any other machine anywhere in the world, or even in space," Sudharshan said.
Traditionally, on college campuses, IT departments figure out what applications and how much capacity are needed by students, faculty and staff. They invest time and often a lot of money developing those resources in-house or buy them from other sources and operate them locally.
With cloud computing, schools can secure IT services from remote providers and let the school community access those resources on the web. In addition, software is hosted by the provider and doesn't need to be installed or maintained on hundreds or even thousands of individual computers belonging to the college. The cloud providers are experts with regard to their specific services and therefore will manage all maintenance and upgrades for us. Reliability may rise, as costs fall.
How important is this trend? Consider the sheer volume of data darting about in cyberspace. The Cisco Global Cloud Index recently predicted that data traffic will climb twelve-fold over the next three years, reaching 4.8 zettabytes by 2015. And the fastest growing piece of the web's data explosion will be cloud computing.
"Cloud and data center traffic is exploding, driven by user demand to access volumes of content on the devices of their choice," said Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of product and solutions marketing.
Sudharshan has written about cloud computing and its implications for a 21st century business school. "Cloud infrastructure will permit us to access experts, information, tools, news, peer evaluation, peer-to-peer collaboration and knowledge validation," he wrote.
In his paper, Sudharshan pondered what the cost of cloud computing will be. More importantly, however, he wondered what the cost to human development will be if such access is denied.
In a recent interview with Business Lexington, Sudharshan talked about the significance of cloud computing for higher education.
"When we don't have access to information, knowledge, learning and education, democracy itself suffers. If we want to have a free, peaceful and prosperous world, we need such opportunities to be available," he explained.
Sudharshan said that the number of brick and mortar buildings and the number of faculty that will be required to teach will be far greater than what the world can produce in the next ten years. There has to be greater access to information.
"The scope and variety of highly specialized knowledge is exploding. We have to have the ability to leverage every opportunity for learning so it can be available to a broader part of the population," he said.
"Higher education institutions must make specialized information available at the convenience of the learner, at the location of the learner. This may take a complete re-thinking of how education is being delivered," he said.
"(Cloud computing) is naturally occurring and the momentum for it is growing at universities like UK where the College of Arts and Sciences has taken the lead recently," Subharshan said. "In terms of a massive rethinking of education around the world, it is slowly beginning to happen."
It may someday be possible to earn one degree or certification by taking single courses from many colleges, he said. A decade from now, "You are going to see many more people from around the world accessing the knowledge of any given institution," he added.
With the very definition of a college campus being challenged, will there one day be fewer students attending classes in campus buildings? Sudharshan calculated that about the same numbers of students will fill classrooms in the near future, but "you will see more people taking advantage of cloud-based learning, both on campus and off."
Students might not need to take a full course, but little snippets of a course - a lecture, for instance, said Sudharshan.
"For an individual who is highly motivated, the opportunity to learn is growing by leaps and bounds," he said.