No Mystery, No Doubt!
Smartphone clouds occur naturally when an organization issues a number of phones to its employees or associates. These microcomputers may be administered under a single management application such as RIM’s Blackberry Enterprise Server and Microsoft’s System Server for Mobile. There are several others implementations by equally prestigious and lesser developer organizations. A true smartphone cloud is technically composed of nothing but smartphones connected to a server or a group of servers that coordinate those smartphones’ various assignments for attacking a problem. Each smartphone is given a small portion of the problem to address by the server and the server tracks the performance of the smartphone farm it manages. In this overly strict definition, the advantages are gained through putting the relatively weak but nonetheless idle computing power of the many smartphones available to work.
This collaborative effort has the potential for freeing up some of the more expensive and costly operating servers’ capacity for additional problem-solving on the same dime that enables those human resources with smartphones in their hands to become mobile and instantly accessible. When the humans who use smartphones are idle, the opportunity to keep the IT asset busy is a significant consideration to the expense of deploying mobility tools. The more phones in the cloud, the merrier the corporate IT benefit!
Cloud Computing is as Complicated as 1, 2, 3
Dividing the computing work into the three segments; public, business, and government, helps to define what the cloud is in terms of what it does or may eventually do for any particular person or group. A smartphone cloud is a private group of devices managed by a server or a group of servers. Although the “cloud,” as a term used in its widest context is much larger and more complex in its diversity of components that aren’t relevant to a smartphone cloud’s contributory results. In this article, we define public cloud computing as non-government or corporate, and therein include the non-profits and the entrepreneurial administrations that may be fairly large in membership. The typical policy definitions that permit individually owned smartphones to be employed in occupational activities place those organizations in the public cloud.
The potential hazards incumbent to such policies are understandably unacceptable in most government and tier 1 corporate environments but may be necessary evils that currently are an intrinsic part of public computing. Some smartphone cloud developers address this issue by providing proprietary applications for supplemental use by users who have random associative or defined affiliations with a group or a corporate organization. Tasks, such as presence notification, instant messaging, and polling are off-loaded from the smartphone’s execution and run in a virtual session over a browser that can accept input from and display results on the handset’s smaller screen.