By Michael Brown 1

Now that you clearly have a firm and unwavering grasp on “the cloud”, it’s time to move on. The cloud is so yesterday. Now it is time to start reading up on “the fog”. What’s that? You haven’t yet or just barely got a good handle on exactly what cloud computing is and how it works? Well, before you begin to panic about this new “fog” thing, let’s take a quick look at what it really is.

“The Fog” is the newest trending buzzword in the cloud computing tech world, as you can see from this article from the Wall Street Journal. However, I set aside my initial frustration and panic over the apparent antiquation the cloud, to really take a look at what this fog-thing was really all about.

The problem with cloud computing is the massive amount of data that needs to be sent back and forth, and as the article states “Getting data into and out of the cloud is harder than most engineers, or at least their managers, often are willing to admit.” Once you factor in the need for moving data to a slew of mobile devices in many different locations, the bandwidth speed begins to suffer. So, we arrive at “the fog”.

“Luckily there's an obvious solution: Stop focusing on the cloud, and start figuring out how to store and process the torrent of data being generated by the Internet of Things (also known as the industrial Internet) on the things themselves, or on devices that sit between our things and the Internet.”

Marketers at Cisco were the ones that coined the idea of fog computing, alluding to it happening around you and close to the ground (rather than “way up there” in the clouds). The idea is that they can harness computers and devices that are in cars, handhelds, appliances and more, to handle portions of the computing. They are also developing “smart routers” that will help determine what data needs to go where.

These are of course interesting ideas and developments in the realm of cloud computing, but as I said before, do not panic about the new “fog”. In all honesty, it seems to be just another buzzword for something we technically already have. Really they are just creating different terminology for something that we have discussed times before; hybrid computing. Yes hybrid computing can refer to the use of both private and public clouds, but I also like typically consider hybrid computing as using both private and public clouds, in addition to local servers. Cisco and other companies are just working on new innovative ways to turn smaller devices into mini computation servers. Like I said, it is very interesting, but not as “new” as the sparkling new fog computing term may indicate.

It seems to me that anyone already familiar with cloud computing and file sharing, also, already knows about fog computing. It is simple putting a new name on something that is currently already happening. What are your thoughts on “fog computing”? Brand new concept, or brand new name for an existing concept?