Meet the Superman on tap

It’s the next wave in computing, offering unimaginable power of problem-solving. Organisations, however, will have to carefully consider business models

- Pratima Harigunani

T-Rex at right swipe. Genie in a bottle-cap. Potter’s invisible cloak on rent. No matter how you try to explain it, nothing conjures up the sheer scale and surreal wonder of QaaS better than just saying it as it is – Quantum as a Service or QaaS.

Quantum! The word is enough to convey how elusive these machines can be. We know why quantum computers draw so much fascination and curiosity. They are way past classical computers and even supercomputers due to their ‘quantum’ advantage. Physics has manifested so brilliantly in the world of technology that it is hard to imagine that we were content working with bits and bytes just a few months back. Bits meant zero or one – in classical computing. But in quantum world, there can be two states that exist simultaneously (0 and 1 at the same time). This happens thanks to the superposition principle of quantum physics. What follows is a tremendous spike in processing power than was possible with the 0 or 1 representation of data.

QaaS is not just another alphabet soup. Unlike servers, infrastructure and data-centre hardware that easily and brilliantly fit into the cloud model, quantum computers are too huge or complex to shrink in a cloud bubble-wrap. And yet it looks like a natural course that this giant turning point in technology had to take.

Now that qubits are in the game and now that entanglement, superimpositions and two-state computing are not just possible, but practical; who would not want to exploit the immense speed and scale of calculations that quantum computers pack?

Except that it is not that easy to whip up a quantum computer. It’s a complex exercise and the task of maintaining stability of quantum states is riddled with issues around hardware, super-cooling requirements and costs.