Cloud computing storage technology has significantly impacted enterprise operations, and adoption rates continue to soar as the technology matures and "the cloud" effectively becomes one of the biggest buzzwords of the digital age. A new report from Synergy Research Group indicated just how substantial an influence the cloud has, finding that cloud services revenue reached $2 billion in the first quarter of 2013. This is a 56 percent increase over 2012 levels, and with the upward trajectory projected to continue, it's clear that the cloud is on course to change the world.
GCN recently published a detailed timeline of cloud computing that highlights how the technology has gradually evolved over time. The timeline starts in 1982, when the first Ethernet adapter card for IBM PC was released, which introduced the fast connections that cloud computing would later emerge from.
The '90s were big for cloud storage, as in 1996, the Navy launched IT-2, used to build a secure, global network and provide Ethernet connectivity to 270,000 users around the world. The following year, the term "cloud computing" was coined by Ramnath Chellappa, a professor at the University of Texas, when speaking about new paradigms in computing, GCN reported.
In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency established a project that would utilize grid computing to monitor air quality, demonstrating a growing acceptance of collaborative networks by the government. The same year, Intel released Pentium 4 models, which were the first processors that supported virtualization on x86 platforms. GNC also detailed that in 2006, Amazon officially launched its Elastic Compute Cloud, which was an infrastructure-as-a-service offering allowing businesses to utilize contracted computers to run enterprise applications. In 2007, Dropbox was founded by a MIT student and emerged as a file hosting and synchronization service that turned cloud storage into a commodity.
In recent years, much of the activity around the cloud is focused on reinforcing confidence in the security of cloud storage services, spurred by government support and technology maturation.
