Cloud

Few technology buzzwords have been as misused and abused in IT circles as much as "the cloud".  Some people think of "the cloud" as being synonymous with "the Internet", and by the vaguest definition of both that is at least partially true.  It is perhaps no coincidence that the definition of "the cloud" in this context is nebulous -- something indistinct, indefinite, and fuzzy (to say the least).

Simply offering services, file storage, email, or data synchronization over the Internet does not mean that you are offering cloud-based technology.  True cloud technology involves sophisticated load balancing and the availability of large server farms for automated scalability.  For example, you may have a service that utilizes five CPU's in the early morning and five-hundred CPU's during peak afternoon demand.  This is the perfect scenario for the cloud.  Cloud-based services are inherently high-availability, load-balanced, and (effectively) infinitely scalable.  Customers of cloud-technology are billed only by the CPU cycles that they use, not by the potential that they may or may not need.  This is attractive for organizations with wildly fluctuating demands for services.  Why pay for an infrastructure of 500 servers that are only fully utilized 2% of the time?  The cloud, by this definition, can be described as infrastructure-as-a-service, or better still, infrastructure-on-demand.

When we describe Udocx as a cloud-based service, we are applying this definition.  By designing our services to run in a cloud-based infrastructure, we provide a high-availability solution that scales seemlessly and automatically to meet any demand.  This technology is invisible to the end-users, our customers, which is exactly the way it should be.