From Cloud to Fog

While I don’t know much about IT, I have to act like an IT expert at home. This is a typical conversation I have with my wife:

“Lao Gong, why I cannot print out my doc now?”

“Really? Let me check!”

I have to stop everything and jump into the role as an IT helpdesk guy. After I quickly checked, I printed out what she wanted.

“Wow, you are really a genius! What went wrong?”  she asked.

“Well, you just didn’t switch on the printer!”  I almost shouted!

“OK, I will remember next time.”

This is often kind of IT challenges I have to deal with on our daily life. So I almost fell out of my chair when one day my wife said: “I have decided to learn Cloud computing”. I thought my hearing got something wrong, so I asked “Do you know what Cloud is?” “No I don’t know. But I often heard people talking about Cloud, so I think I need to understand something about it.” OK, a big relief from my side as I was worried my wife was talking gibberish and confused due to the side effect of the allergy medication she was taking. She just wanted to get some clarity what Cloud computing really means instead of career changing to Cloud business!

Well, Cloud computing is indeed red hot these days and it will be too hard to not hear people talking about Cloud. If you don’t know, Amazon is the leading company in this business and Microsoft is quickly catching up. Actually it is because of the strategic shift to grow its Cloud business that has pulled Microsoft out of its dead money status. That’s how important it is as one of the major IT megatrends at the moment. It is estimated that by 2020, the global Cloud industry will grow to $411 Billion as a whole and probably 50% or more of companies are expected to depend on the cloud in the years ahead. No wonder even my IT dummy wife is starting to pay attention to Cloud now! But, here is a big BUT, whenever something gets too hot, its most powerful growth period is probably close to its end. Of course, I’m not talking about the end of the Cloud business at all as it still has many years to go with great momentum. However, the best time to make big money for it is probably already over. That’s why I want to open your eye for something even more disruptive in this field. It is called Fog computing.

So what’s Cloud computing? Briefly, it is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer. To use a layman’s language, it is using centralized severs to store and process data via Internet, instead of using our own personal computers. This can substantially increase the flexibility and productivity of businesses and may save IT costs as well. Where the advantage for Cloud computing is the centralized infrastructure, it is also one of the major concerns for it: the security risk. It may also slow down the data transfer that often results in high latency. As such a new innovation is coming, that is Fog computing.  In a nutshell, Fog computing decentralizes the process by sending computing tasks to the most logical, efficient place between the data source and the cloud, rather than large remote data centers. This reduces latency, decreases costs, and solves the security concerns of cloud computing.

Of course I’m not here to educate you what is Cloud vs Fog computing professionally as I’m a layman myself. But you better understand the tidy wave is changing quickly from Cloud to Fog computing. Cisco (CSCO) and Intel (INTC) are the two tech giants heavily developing and applying this technology for businesses. There are also numerous private startup companies that some of them may someday become money machine due to Fog computing. So keep your mind open and your ears perked up, friends!
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