The Fog replaces the Cloud

The days of saving your information on your computer’s hard drive are gone. Now, there is a more efficient way to share or store data in a safer, accessible location. Unfortunately, the luxury to save large amounts of data will affect your bandwidth requirements.

The cloud is commonly used for transferring data back and forth via high-speed wiring. However, because of high demand, bandwidth is getting slower and less effective when large data is shared between multiple devices. Any business that sends data to mobile devices will be forced to deal with the limitations of wireless networks.

According to The Wall Street Journal writer Christopher Mims, one solution is to figure out a way to store and process the torrent of data generated by the Internet of Things, on the things themselves, or on devices that sit between our things and the Internet.

Marketers at Cisco Systems Inc. have labeled this as fog computing. Cisco wants to turn its routers into hubs that gather data.

In IBM’s research project, the fog connects computers that are located in the same area. If our smart devices have the capability to send software updates to one another, instead of going through the cloud, this could cause a lot of competition for the cloud.

Computing that’s as close to the user as possible is going to be critical to making smart devices such as refrigerators and jet engines have the ability to connect to wireless networks.

Mobile apps have become a primary way to do things over the Internet, particularly on smartphones. The data and processing power is handled within your own device.

According to the World Economic Forum, the U.S. ranks 35th overall in bandwidth per user. The U.S. provides the average citizen with 62.3 kB per second; whereas, Luxembourg, ranked number one, provides 4 MB per second.

Current 3G and 4G cellular networks aren’t fast enough to transfer data from devices to the cloud at a necessary pace. Networks will need to improve before more objects start to rely on the cloud.

Have questions about “The Cloud” or “The Fog”?  Give us a call. As your cloud computing experts in Vancouver, we are here to help your business make the right decision about all your business IT needs.  Call (604) 986-8170 or email us at info@compunet.ca.  We want to help you make the right IT support and cloud computing decisions for your business.

Author: Joe Martin, Date: 2014-05-29