Another HexaTech trend that I actually mentioned at the introduction in the series is the cloud computing technology. In fact, cloud computing technology is transforming manufacturing process in multiple ways. In the context of IoT applications of the industrial Internet of Things, I believe that cloud computing technologies significantly changes both the scale and scope of IoT applications in manufacturing. Let's understand how, what is cloud computing? Well, as you see in the left side of this chart, traditionally, we understood computing as something that we have computers installed in our home or an office. An industrial business would have computers installed in their premise. And those computers, yes, to some extent are connected to the network for communication or sending information, things like that. But the primary computer is mainframes or minicomputers or personal computers. They're all in the premises of that business, right? That's how we understood. And their on-site servers, all the information kept within those computers. That is traditional way of industry computing. Well, a couple of decades back the trend of computing, cloud computing emerged and fast as the high speed internet interconnectivity and network evolved. We now have what is the capability called the cloud computing where we store all the computing resources, right? And the data and the logic computing power is distributed. It is kept in remote servers in the network and often called as a cloud. Cloud is the network of high speed computers. You actually kind of host up your data and logic in these computers. And they're often managed by third parties, like Amazon and Microsoft and IBM. And there are also some major cloud providers including Google. And what does this actually, what is the capability that it provides you by centralizing the location of your both computing power and the data sources? And that being situated in a high speed network ubiquitously accessible from everywhere. Now, this now provides an opportunity that you can access beyond your proximity. In other words, the computer doesn't have to be in your building or your home. You can actually access the information from anywhere that is present as we all do when you log into Google and you search for something, you go to a website, there's nothing stored in your computer, but it's actually in the cloud. This is a fundamental transformation because in various ways and especially in the context of business benefits. First, there is a shift from you know ownership to access. Traditional computing, we believe that you need to own the computer, you need to have resources to kind of buy computers for you to have access to those computing capabilities. In other words, if you want to have access to a mainframe as a company, you have to own the mainframe, right? But that's not the case now, the shift is now ownership to access. I could be a a small company that doesn't have the resources to buy a mainframe and a powerful computer. But I can access the computing power of mainframe computer in the cloud, right? And when I access that, they actually charge me only for the part that I accessed and used. In other words, instead of buying and owning these assets as computers, now you have access on usage based pricing. That's a big change because what that does is actually it democratizes the access to computing. Because the access to these computing power that was not available for small and medium companies, now everybody can access. That's one big big change. The second piece is the elasticity, right? When you go to the cloud then you're hosting these big computers and you can actually keep scaling the power there because it's all in a central location and it is being accessed for multiple users. So in other words, the term is called elastic scaling because you can scale as you need. This week I'm going to be doing some project, I need some high speed computing, I can actually access that. And next week I'm not going to be doing any project like that, I could actually use do with some small computing power, I could actually switch to that. So that's the elastic scaling capability that creates another huge opportunity. Now, how does it all connect to the IoT applications, right? Now, if you think about when we define industrial Internet of Things, we said we go beyond computers to connect all these different kinds of devices or they're called things, right? They could be your your tablet PCs, your PCs, your phones, your industrial machines that are used in manufacturing, your simple sensors, right? It means you're kind of sensing with a thermostat or whatever it is. All these are connected to the internet now and then they are stored in a common place. Now, instead of storing them in a traditional way in a computer, if you actually start storing them in the cloud, what happens? Well then it gives the capability just we talked about as in the case of thermostat example. All these manufacturing information from different machines, all these things could be stored in the central location in the cloud. And when you store it in the central location of the cloud, then that becomes accessible to anywhere in the world, right? So if you're a large manufacturing company with different multiple manufacturing plants and you can actually access the data, real time data coming from these sensors and these devices connected to the industrial Internet of Things applications, right? They can be accessible from anywhere, the decision maker, if she's either locally present or she's traveling internationally, she can still get access to all this information. Because it is now situated in the cloud and you can actually access through cloud, right? Similarly, since it is elastically scalable, you could actually do this application in one plant, you can actually use to expand this into multiple plants as the size of this data explains or the kind of logic actually expands. So you can actually manage these applications directly from the cloud. So we'll talk later that you see that most of these IoT application, industrial Internet of Things applications are actually now more and more rendered on platforms that are sitting in cloud. Especially because of this power that comes to the cloud computing. Another concept that you will actually come across more recently in the last few years is called edge computing. There's something called cloud computing and there's edge computing. Well, edge computing is nothing else but this external layer on top of the core cloud. Core cloud is the high speed computers are connected on top of this external layer. Now we connect all these different kinds of devices and things as we call in Internet of Things. So they all have intelligence now. What is happening is that with kind of miniaturization of processing power and then the Morse law, we have more and more intelligence in some of these devices. And they are actually connected to the periphery of the cloud and that's why they're called edge devices, right? And this edge computing concept is more popular now because now as the companies think about designing business applications on industrial Internet of Things. They have to make a decision in terms of what kind of intelligence would they actually kind of keep on the edge of this cloud and what will go in the core of this cloud. So there is an interesting trade off in terms of what should be the intelligence in the edge and then what should be in the cloud? As we design the application for it to be the more capable and usable across different locations. In summary, we talked about what is cloud computing? We understood how is this different from traditional computing, the way we understood computing two decades back? And what has changed and what does it really mean to push all these computing power and data into the cloud? We also talked about the business benefits, right? How these cloud computing concept has fundamentally change the economics of access to computing power. And how it has democratized access to computing power. Then we connected that with why the concept of cloud computing is important from the context of IoT applications for large manufacturing companies. Why they need that elastic scaling capability for them to scale and manage the scope of their IoT applications. And finally, we touched upon the concept of edge computing and the importance of balancing the intelligence between what should be in the edge of these applications. And then what should be in the core within the cloud for these applications.
