Cloud communications? Whats that all about?
Back when computer networks and the Internet were first emerging, there were a number of seminars - such as those presented at conferences like Networld+Interop - to educate end users on these new technologies. After attending a few of these, I discovered that there was one graphic that almost all of the presenters used: a model of a large network where the WAN was shown as a "cloud". Some speakers referred to this cloud as "data heaven" - you send you data into the WAN, and you hope and pray that it comes out the other end!
Too simplistic, you say? Yes, but the concept was correct. It was the WAN provider's responsibility to deliver your data, and the details of their internal network infrastructure were almost irrelevant to the end users. That WAN provider could have deployed copper pairs, fiber strands or even two tin cans and a piece of string, and as long as the data came through, that was all that mattered. The benefits to the customer was clear: you avoided the up-front capital costs of building a network from scratch, had someone else to call if a problem occurred, and only had to pay for the network resources that you consumed.
So let's fast forward a couple of decades and ask "what is cloud computing? In short, cloud computing takes the initial concept - the WAN cloud - and extends it.
First, take the example of servers. If you don't have the financial or physical resources to host your own website, you can hire a company that owns racks of servers to host the site for you. As before, you do not have to purchase, operate, upgrade or maintain the server - that becomes the hosting provider's responsibility. All you have to do is to pay for the server resources that you use.
Next, let's extend that hosting concept one more time. What if you were able to share the application - not just the servers? In other words, what if a company wrote an application - perhaps more powerful and sophisticated than one you could afford - and then allowed you to share in that technology? As before, you would not have any up front capital expenses for either software development or the computing platforms that the application runs on. You would not be responsible for system maintenance, upgrades or troubleshooting. In effect, you would be like a tenant in a large apartment complex, sharing the resources like the swimming pool and the gym, but without any of the responsibilities to keep those facilities up and running.
Now you see what we did here at Smoothstone - develop a very sophisticated voice and data communications application, host that application on servers that we provide and maintain, and provide our customers with access to our "cloud". Our customers only pay for the resources that they consume, providing them with a more cost-effective, reliable and secure communications environment, and without all the headaches that go along with more conventional PBX system deployment.
James Whitemore
