Homework

ICT deals more with the organisational and business side of IT systems, and the theory behind good data, types of information and information flows. You study topics like the Nature of Information, Role of IT in Organisations, and Management Information Systems. Also, ICT is softer - but wasn't supposed to be originally - it was supposed to cover telecommunications subjects that weren't covered by 'traditional' studies in computer science that taught programming and software engineering. ICT can cover routing and configuration - or at least that was the idea. But if you want to be a real 'techie' I'd suggest doing Computing. It depends what interests you - computing science will always be more in depth and for people who are happier working on difficult mathematical problems rather than organisational ones. Beware though - skills in computing can get outdated pretty sharpish and you'll be upgrading your skills annually for the rest of your career. Computing is a lot more technical, with less emphasis on business and more emphasis on the actual design and programming of IT systems. Also computing involves a lot of maths, and unlike ICT, you will actually be expected to learn how to use a number of programming languages. Topics include things such as Networking, Hardware and Operating Systems.

Cloud computing.

Not too long ago, one of the leading computer companies filed an application to trademark the term ‘cloud computing’, which was denied by the US Patent and Trademark Office. That was in August 2008 when cloud computing was in its infancy. Yet that act was a kind of starting line: since then, cloud computing has received a lot of attention.

The economic downturn most likely provided an impetus to jumpstart cloud computing. The potential is huge. Cloud computing could transform the IT industry from an asset-centric approach to a services-centric approach. It could change IT from on-premise technology to on-demand services.

The last two years saw tremendous innovation and progress, especially in the ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ realm. Because of the low utilization of servers and the introduction of virtualization layer and related software, server virtualization took off. What started off as a concept concerning the virtualization of servers has extended to include network virtualization, desktop virtualization and application virtualization.

Amazon, a retail giant, has quietly become a big player in the IT industry through innovation. The growth of this industry has not been without some setbacks. There has been the publicized outage of Amazon EC2 and the Sony Playstation network data breach.