Introduction to Cloud Computing

Welcome to my post this is my second post in which I will disscuss about my project topic "Cloud Computing". I chose this topic because it was an interesting one. I will be resesarching about cloud computing and describe what cloud computing really is and how do we use it in our daily lives and how cloud computing can help us. I am conducting this research to create awareness about this issue and teach people about the pro's and con's of cloud computing.

                        Source: Freepik

Cloud computing is just amazing it works like magic. You are able to get all your tools from the toolbox at any given time and anywhere in the world, all you need is the cloud (Internet). Cloud computing has numerous advantages:

Ease of handling huge amounts of data

All of your data is at one place and organised as you like on the cloud and you can get access to everything such as your photos, passwords, emails etc. 

Scalability

When it comes to cloud computing there is no limit to the data that you can store. Infact, big companies can scale their database whenever they feel the need to increase or decrease.

No need for advance systems

You do not need to invest huge sums on high-tech computer systems to store your data. You can store it on cloud instead, the data is stored on advance systems somewhere in the world and you can use services like MS Azure or AWS.

                Source: pixabay

According to Google cloud brand pulse survey Q3 (2022) most likely 41.4% of global business leaders plan to increase their investments in cloud based services and products due to the current economic climate. However, with all the advantages there are some drawbacks of cloud computing as well.

Internet Connectivity

The biggest drawback can be internet itself as sometimes there can be a disruption of service at the company and it can create a negetive impact and they can fall back just because of internet downtime.

Vulnerability to attack

As all of the data is stored on cloud which is basically the internet, it increases the risk to get data breached and all of the data can get hacked and be used for illegal purpose.

Cost

Cloud services are cheap if you want it just for your ownself. However, when it comes to small scale business or a business on a bigger scale it is much more expensive as now you will have to pay for the hardware and software and make a cloud system as per your need.

These are some of the positive aspects and drawbacks of cloud computing. I am doing this reasearch to learn about cloud computing's fundamental concept and to be able to present it for my presentation as this is my project/assignment. While I am doing my research I also want to spread the knowledge I have gained and I hope that you will be able to learn something new with the research i have done by reading my blog.

Reference List:

          Franklin, B. (2023) 40 cloud computing stats and trends to know in 2023 | google cloud blog, Google. Available at: https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/top-cloud-computing-trends-facts-statistics-2023 (Accessed: 18 November 2023).

          Larkin, A. (2023) Disadvantages of cloud computing, Cloud Academy. Available at:        https://cloudacademy.com/blog/disadvantages-of-cloud-computing/ (Accessed: 01 December 2023).

Primary Research

Primary research plays a vital role in any project which means it is an important part of a project. Primary research has 8 different types, Basic research, Applied research and more. For our project we need to do primary research to learn and understand what the the topic is and what information can we add from the internet to our project with the rules and ethics in mind.

Furthermore, I will be doing my primary research with the help of a google form survey that we have designed and we asked 10 questions to my classmates to gather their responses.

Our Google Form Link: Google Form

We started in a group and opened a new blank Google form. Firstly we added a photo of a person with some technological elements to make it look more professional, Also we added the title in BOLD to add a bit more emphasis and used sans-serif font. Secondly we just added a small description mentioning the reason and prupose of our form. Moreover, we asked some Multiple Choice Questions about the topic from our research and understanding. The questions were simple to avoid complexity. We gave our surveyors interesting questions with more than a couple of options to choose from so that its easy for them and for us as well.

Here you can see some multiple choice questions taken from our google form these questions were basic and we asked these questions because we thought they were easy to answer. All the researched information for our google form was fetched from different websites which gave us a breif overview of the topic. After learning about cloud computing, we asked questions like what are the full form of the specific terms like 'SaaS' and what do you know about cloud computing. We provided simple answers to choose from.

At the end of our form we asked our surveyors about their opinion on wheather they are comfortable with storing their data online on cloud based systems. We asked about this question because In this digital era we have many security and privacy issues as there might be cyber attacks and your data can be compromised and your confidential data may get public.

Below are a couple of responses that we got on our google form regarding the questions we asked:

The first chart shows the data of how many people are concerned about their data security stored on cloud systems and you can see majority of people have strong concern regarding their data stored which is about 44.4% of the total. 33.3% people are somewhat concerned while 22.2% people do not care at all.

The second pie chart shows how many people chose what they thought cloud computing was as per the options we provided and we can clearly see that 70% of surveyors chose the third option which is represented with yellow color and 30% chose the first option represented with blue color and none of our surveyors chose the second option which is shown in red.

Atlast, I would like to show you some of the responses we got on a question we asked which was that what are your thoughts on what are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing are.

These are the responses of different individuals.

Reference List

          Andrew, L. (2023) What is cloud computing?  |  google cloud, Google. Available at: https://cloud.google.com/learn/what-is-cloud-computing (Accessed: 03 December 2023).

          What is cloud computing? (2022) IBM. Available at: https://www.ibm.com/topics/cloud-computing (Accessed: 03 December 2023).

           Polski, M. (2023) What is cloud computing? - aws.amazon.com, AWS. Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/ (Accessed: 03 December 2023).

Welcome to my blog

Social Media

NAME: Hammad Hassan Raja 

Group-A P2817519

Hello everyone  and welcome to my blog. My name is Hammad Hassan Raja, I am currently a student at De MontFort University studying Computer Science BSc. My main goal to write this blog is to educate myself as well as all of you with research on my project topic which is "CLOUD COMPUTING". It will be a blog on how I managed to complete my project and It will consist the following blog posts:

• Introduction
• Primary Research
• Secondary research 
• Evaluation 

In this blog I will start by a current issue regarding IT and then proceed with my own topic with above mentioned headings. I like to play video games, In fact there was a time I used to play as a professional player locally. My firends often see me as the funny guy and I mostly tend to be a calm person. The recent developments of the world caused the rise of computer machines and i started to develop an interest in these machines with unlimited possibilities hence, chose computer science as my degree course

As the world is dynamic and is constantly developing with greater and better technology introduced to the world. All this tecnology is made to make our lives much more easier and comfortable. Although, I agree on the fact that technology has been beneficial for us in our daily lives but it also has impacted many of us negetively and one aspect of technology which has caused numerous issues is the use of "Social Media".

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A survey conducted by the Royal Society For Public Health including people of age 14 to 24 in United Kingdom on how social media platform impacted their health and the survey results were that platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram surge the feeling of depression, anxiety and loneliness. This survey gives us a little understanding of what social media does to our brains. 

Excessive use of these social media apps can have impacts far worse such as non-social behavior, anger issues and loosing on critical social skills. Communication skills have also decreased in the recent years just because of chatting on social media platforms this has also lead to lower slef-confidance in teenagers.

                                                                            

                                                                                     Source: Freepik

Another issue of using social media is cyber bullying and according to Donna Wick (2023) "Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone's face". Many of social media users have experinced cyber bullying at some point in their life wheather in a comment or a private message.

Social media forces individuals to live in an imaginary world with lavish lifestyle shown to all of us by huge influencers and this has a negetive impact on kids as well as the adults. To solve this growing problem we all need to limit our daily time spent on these apps and try not to think that whatever is shown to you is real. We should get invloved in physical sports and educate about the drawbacks of social media.

REFERENCE  LIST:

         Ehmke, R. (2023) How using social media affects teenagers, Child Mind Institute. Available at: https://childmind.org/article/how-using-social-media-affects-teenagers/#cyberbullying-and-the-imposter-syndrome (Accessed: 22 November 2023).

        

Secondary Research

Secondary Research

Secondary research was the hard part for us as there was a huge amount of information available on the internet. We started our research and there were numerous articles on our topic which were advance level for us, So we had to spend most of our time to research the articles or journals which matched our level of understanding. I learned ample of new information while my group conducted the research such as:

•  How cloud computing works
•  How it is used by businesses 
•  What Organisation provide cloud computing services
•  How cloud computing is integrated in our daily life
•  Analysed statistics of how much data is stored 
•  Learned about the High tech systems that stores our data ( Database ) 

 

 

                      Source: Freepik

For this research our main goal was to achieve knowledge about the topic by other individuals. Secondly, We compared the primary research that my group and I did and highlighted the differences between our research and the data that the researcher has gathered. While doing the comparison there were lots of differences, We had the basic fundamental concept in our surveys and interviews and they had many individual concepts of each specific term to define or to make us understand how it works at the backend. It also included the specific data of different companies and service providers. We named this research as Market research in our presentation. All of the above mentioned points were disscussed in our presentation for example in the year 2025 it is predicted that there will be about 200 zetabytes of data stored on the cloud based systems mentioned in a report by Data attack surface.

                                                     Source: www.economist.com

At last, in our secondary research there was one more interesting sub topic which is the purpose of Cloud Computing: "Purpose of cloud computing in organizations". 

1. Analyzing data for research and development
2. Meeting spikes in demand on our website or internal systems
3. Processing and storing applications or other forms 

Although we were not able to include all of the researched information in our presentation but in my blog post I have discussed everything in detail of our research. We also took help from youtube videos to understand cloud computing with visual art and our overall experience was fascinating. We learned about the basic cloud computing in an easy way and I hope to achieve better results in my group presentation and blogs.

Reference List:

          Kumar, S. (2019) Cloud computing cloud computing -overview, NIST. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/40733822/CLOUD_COMPUTING_Cloud_Computing_Overview (Accessed: 06 November 2023).

            Kolesnikov, N. (2023) 65+ cloud computing statistics updated for December 2023 - Techopedia, Techopedia. Available at: https://www.techopedia.com/cloud-computing-statistics (Accessed: 14 November 2023).

            Cloud Computing Explained (2020). YouTube. 28 July. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M988_fsOSWo (Accessed: 15 November 2023).