Please join us before the technical meeting for a bar meal and chin wag in the

RA Centre's Fieldhouse Restaurant at 6pm.

This is the first of what we hope will be many joint meetings with the British Computer Society (BCS) and we are grateful to them for organising this presentation.

Cloud Computing

Just what is cloud computing, anyway?

According to the Gartner Group, cloud computing is the “phrase du jour”. The problem is that there are many different interpretations of what it is.

This presentation will examine how the internet (the cloud) is being used to support utility computing (on-demand resource sharing of software, hardware, data, storage etc). It will illustrate some of the approaches being taken by vendors such as Microsoft and Google and it will discuss the particular challenges posed by cloud computing as well as the prospects for the future.

Our Speaker - Bill McCrum

Bill McCrum has an Honours Bachelor and Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Queen`s University of Belfast. He recently retired after a long career with Industry Canada where he was Deputy Director General, Spectrum Engineering. His responsibilities included telecommunications regulation, post market surveillance, network vulnerability analysis, and implementation of telecom aspects of various Trade Agreements with Canada’s major trading partners. He was also Executive Secretary of the ICT Standards Advisory Council of Canada (ISACC). He continues to participate in a number of international standards bodies. Bill has authored a technical book on network interconnection issues and published a wide range of technical papers on data communications issues.