How is CAD looking in the Australian clouds…
July 9, 2010, 10:16 am
Every company these days wants to be innovative, creative and unique to be able to stay on the edge of a highly competitive market. We can say the competition is now doubled since everyone is recovering for the blow they have had from GFC (Global financial Crises). In this process a lot of companies are looking at immerging innovative technologies like virtualization, Cloud Computing, etc more seriously hoping that they might rescue and make them stand out of the crowd. Though these technologies existed before not many companies took them seriously since things were all sailing smooth for them. For example who cared about Search Engine optimization 5 years ago? Even a layman these days wants to Google stuff on the internet. Without getting diverted from the topic too much I would like to focus more on the CAD/CAM industry and how is it getting affected by the Cloud Computing Technology.
Everyone talks about Cloud Computing, what the heck it?
To sum it in short and simple terms it’s a kind of computing service which can be compared to our electricity and telephone connections where we pay for what we use every month or once in two months. Ok now that is too generic, I will go ahead a give a more specific example. We use MS word and Excel at our work almost on a regular basis. Now consider a situation where there is no MS word or Excel on your office computer, you just hop on to a website login with your username and password use word or excel create a document save it on that website and then sign out. You can go home and access the same document that you saved just by logging in to the same website that you logged in, in your office. I couldn’t find a simpler explanation of cloud computing than this one, click here to watch what cloud computing is all about in simple words.
You said we will have to store the documents on that website. Where are they getting stored and how secured is my data?
Like every other thing in this world that comes with good and bad things cloud computing without being different has emerged with some rather serious negatives. And as the saying goes ‘one bad fruit spoils the whole basket of fruits’ security issue seems like its spoiling the all good reputation of cloud computing. A lot of cloud computing service vendors are having a tough time convincing the companies that the data stored in the clouds will be secured. The companies have to hire a cloud depending on the size of data the organisation has and store all the data there. I can compare this to having a bank account with a lot of money but you don’t care about security for your bucks since you trust the bank. This is the message all the cloud computing companies want to convey to the people but since data is the heart of any organisation not many people want to take chances. Majority of the companies are silently watching the innovators and the early adopters (please see Innovation Adoption Curve of Rogers) implementing the cloud computing technology in their companies just to see how efficient and secured it turns out to be.
What are the effects of Cloud computing on the CAD/CAM industry?
CAD/CAM stands for Computer Aided Designing/ Computer Aided Manufacturing which is using of computer technology for the design and manufacturing of products (If you didn’t know). CAD can be used to design 2D and 3D figures. And there are many companies like Alibre, Autodesk, Siemens, Dassault systems that develop CAD software’s. But cloud computing is about to change the way these companies function. Because a designer can now open up his browser login with his username password get started with the designing and save it there itself and the designs get stored in the cloud. But the matter of concern here is the security of the company’s product designs. Companies fear that their designs might be stolen from the clouds. And all the cloud computing companies are busy convincing people that they are totally reliable giving them the example of the bank and the accounts. And one advantage for the designers will be ‘version less’ CAD i.e. every time a new version comes the software is automatically updates in the clouds and the designs that were in the old format automatically get transformed to the new updated version. To give you a best example ‘Facebook’ and Google Docs we don’t care what version of FB we are using since it is auto updated.
In the coming days do you think Cloud Computing will be able to convince people that it is secured enough and sustain or do you think it’s going join the troop of failed technologies, only time will tell us.
