IT-CRUISERS: Everything IT

It was a remarkable day for the future of cloud technology in Africa as Oracle launched the first cloud region (Cloud Data center) on African soil - In Johannesburg South Africa. This means users of cloud services especially within Africa can now be able to choose a location closer to them for hosting of their cloud resources and applications. Also regulatory requirements would be met such as the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR). What is a cloud region/Data center? It is the actual, real-life geographic location where your public cloud resources are located, where your data resides physically. Some think of the cloud to be a hypothetical or intangible storage in the sky, but it is indeed a physical robust IT infrastructure consisting of server machines and high-speed network connectivity designed to provide secured access to a large number of users or subscribers. Currently, Oracle has about 39 cloud regions around the world. Google boasts of 29 regions, Amazon AWS 26 regions,...

At one time or the other, you may have used or heard such expressions as “Downloading file from server”, “server is slow”, “Authentication required for server access”, and so on. These are everyday expressions used in the present Information Age. Now let us take a closer look at what a server really is, with emphasis on the type of server that makes it possible for access to the Information Superhighway – the Internet, known as Web Servers , as well as what actually happens when an internet user tries to access a website via a Web Browser by sending a (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol) HTTP request to the web server. WHAT IS A SERVER? A server is basically a computer program that serves some sort of content to a client using a specified protocol. The term server also refers to the computer or virtual machine running the server program, which in fact is the most common use and understanding of the term. Today, most enterprise organisations with computer network infrastructure do host th...