For a computer and internet bunny, what a challenge to provide some sort of summary of what John Taylor told us about the cloud this week!

However, what I think I learned (E&OE) was:

• The cloud provides the ability to access high speed computing over the internet.

• What makes this possible is the provision of multiple data centres all over the world, always available and durable and, most importantly, totally secure. Currently 20 centres are in service with another 4 on the way,

• Sydney is our closest centre. N.Z. lacks security of power supply to be viable for this purpose.

• Amazon Company, in 2006, decided to sell infrastructure as a service (iaas) based on its own development of massive systems of racks to handle its world-wide sales of books then other products.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) floated at $US18 per share – now worth about $1900!

• The data centres provide at least 160 services to customers e.g.  app. creation, A.I., web applications, internet of things etc. etc.

• Economy of scale has greatly reduced the cost of maintaining storage of data for customers whilst giving fastest performance, highest availability and reliability, the largest and most flexible global footprint and the strongest security.

• You don’t buy a package, you just pay for what is used, when and where.

• All data inputted is owned by the provider and can only be accessed by the provider’s personal system.