When I was writing my case write-up about wikipedia, I happend to notice that wikipedia has more than four million articles in english! You can’t make me believe they store all these articles on one server, which made me remember an article I read around a year ago. A new hype in web 2.0 next to social networks is Cloud computing. Cloud computing means that you can pay a cloud provider to manage your information flows of your company, and storing it in a ‘cloud’. This means the cloud provider puts the information on a server of a third party. The question you ask of course, is why should you do that? It is very simple. First, since you don’t have to buy and maintain the hardware that you need in order to store your information. Second, that you don’t have to worry about your security not being up to date, since the cloud provider takes care of that. Conclusion, it saves a lot of money. The disadvantage however is the privacy. for example if the information of around a 1000 people is on one server, how do you make sure only the owner of the information is allowed to see it? If you want to read more about this topic, you can read the following article:
Zhang, Q. & Cheng, L. & Boutaba, R. (2010) Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and research challenges. Journal of internet services and applications, 1(1), 7-18. Doi: 10.1007/s13174-010-0007-6
