Consumer Cloud: Concepts, Vendor Solutions, Industry Applications and Way Forward
Over the years, consumers have been accessing the World Wide Web to perform one or more of the personal functions such as accessing email via messenger/phone communication; managing social and professional identities using networking sites; education and
- PDF / 394,113 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 10 Downloads / 186 Views
Consumer Cloud: Concepts, Vendor Solutions, Industry Applications and Way Forward Naveen Kumar and Sudhanshu Hate
Abstract Over the years, consumers have been accessing the World Wide Web to perform one or more of the personal functions such as accessing email via messenger/phone communication; managing social and professional identities using networking sites; education and learning via the web; entertainment through listening to music and watching movies; and managing documents, organizing finances and going to the extent of managing small businesses over the web. The traditional discrete web-based solutions deal with consumer needs in a highly fragmented manner, through multiple discrete point solutions and devices. This has given rise to challenges in cross-leveraging data, missing contextual intelligence and lack of unified experience across applications leading to loss of productivity and opportunities. Solutions leveraging the cloud provision overcome several of these challenges and are becoming popular, e.g. Apple iCloud platform. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are fast building strategic partnerships with product vendors to bridge platform gaps and are bringing in innovations to grab a sizeable pie to emerge as a leader in the digital sphere of the consumer ecosystem. This chapter looks at the interesting scenarios for consumer clouds, vendors, technologies, industries and trends currently shaping up as they start to take centre stage in the consumer’s activities. Keywords Consumer cloud • Cloud vendors • iCloud • Cloud challenges • Web-based solutions • Enterprise cloud
N. Kumar • S. Hate (*) Infosys Ltd., Bangalore, Karnataka, India e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] Z. Mahmood (ed.), Cloud Computing: Methods and Practical Approaches, Computer Communications and Networks, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-5107-4_4, © Springer-Verlag London 2013
67
68
4.1
N. Kumar and S. Hate
Introduction
Earlier in the year, on April 2, 2011, I recorded the Cricket World Cup final match between India and Sri Lanka that India won. I was happy thinking I would get to watch this high-definition (HD) recorded moments at my will rather than relying on the TV channels to repeat the recordings. A couple of months after, ironically, my TV setup box started malfunctioning. The service provider graciously agreed to replace the setup box at free of cost, as it was within a year’s warranty. However, later I came to know that with the setup box, I was going to lose all my recorded programs along with the recorded 2011 World Cup victory, which was closer to my heart like many Indian fans. This was because all the programs were saved on the local disk of the setup box. I thought if the service provider had given me the option to save these programs on cloud and in turn charge small fees, I would not have landed in this situation. While this is a very simple use case or scenario of marrying the consumer electronics (TV) with Cloud, it has a significant impact on our day-to-day lives. This scenario and solution is
Data Loading...
