While cloud computing is far from a magic bullet for all your data storage and security woes, organizations are enjoying meaningful benefits in the form of cost-efficiency, on-demand scalability, heavy upfront capital shifted to recurring operational expenses, augmented resources and skills now at their fingertips, and more.
The predecessor to cloud, shared/multitenant computing, goes all the way back to our early history of using mainframes, including time-sharing, virtual machines and remote access. Cryptography and encryption techniques are nothing new to us; they’ve been used repeatedly throughout history. Some of us may even be old enough to remember the now-retired subscription-based hosted frameworks, such as Compuserve and Prodigy, and email and portal frameworks such as Excite@Home. Today, these all could be referred to as cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. So what makes today’s shared computing frameworks different?
