The Society for Promotion of Science and Technology in India, organized its monthly lecture on today at the Physics Department, Panjab University. The topic for the today’s lecture was Cloud Computing and its future. The speakers were Chandra Shekhar of Dell Computers and Pawan Behl, CEO, Electro Photo Equipment Pvt. Ltd. The lecture was well attended by members of the Society, students, teachers of computer science from Chandigarh colleges and Professors, inluding Dr. Tankeshwar, Head of Computer Centre, Panjab University.

Giving comprehensive overview of the Cloud Computing, the speakers apprised the audience of the concept of ‘cloud’ and its potential in the world of computers and its potential. Cloud computing which is closely linked to ‘virtualization’ aims at optimizing CPU usage and allows the use of many operating systems on the same hardware – the cloud. With the advent of cloud computing, the burden of data storage would shift from the desk-top or lap-top to servers and data can be accessed from anytime and anywhere. Thus, the clouding computing leads to economy of using ICT services resulting in lower costs.

The lecture also presented interesting facts such as all the server farms in the US consume 2% of the total energy used in that country; or that Nandan Nilekani’s UID, based on cloud, is the world’s largest non-commercial data centre. The main concerns in the area seem to be security and privacy of data and all public domain net servers including Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. are paying special attention to these issues. Another debate brewing in the subject is who owns the data. Despite all these concerns, the cloud services are becoming popular and it is the technology of the future. It has enormous potential for employment for which educational institutions should gear up and provide training to youth in this field. A lively discussion ensued after the presentations.

The speakers were honoured with bouquets and mementoes presented on behalf of the SPSTI by Dharam Vir, President of the Society and Prof. Suman Beri, Vice President. Prof. Keya Dharamvir, Secretary of the society proposed a vote of thanks.