A Beginner’s Guide To Cloud Storage
Your future appears to be cloudy with a chance of megabytes.
Cloud storage is one of those buzzword concepts beloved by modern-day IT experts, who often assume everyone knows what the term means – and how it works. With many consumers now using cloud storage without realizing, it’s worth taking a quick look at this subject for anyone who doesn’t yet enjoyed the benefits of having their data in the clouds…
Where Is the Cloud?
Whenever we edit or change information on a computer or mobile device, those changes have to be stored somewhere. Back in the early years of the new millennium, that typically meant saving a document onto a computer’s hard drive or a floppy disc, with reassuring whirs and flashing lights informing us that the process was underway. However, with almost every domestic device now connected to the internet, the humble home computer is no longer the only source of digital data in our lives. We’re as likely to read emails on a smartphone as a PC, and it’s no longer convenient to have documents accessible from just one machine.
Cloud storage underpins many of the applications we already use today, including social media and web mail. Sent emails and status updates aren’t stored on a tablet or laptop anymore; instead, they’re hosted on the service provider’s own machines. Each device effectively becomes a terminal that displays information being piped to it, in the same way news and sports apps passively display externally-generated content. Similar principles apply to cloud storage services like Dropbox, where documents are stored remotely.
Speed and Convenience
The gradual rollout of high-speed broadband internet access often means it’s quicker to upload data to a cloud-hosted server than transferring it onto a portable hard drive or burning it onto a CD. However, the principles of file storage haven’t really changed. Cloud storage can be thought of as a personal hard drive that is located on the internet and accessed through broadband or wifi, with our account details typically remembered by each device so we don’t have to constantly identify ourselves. Saving a file to the cloud creates a permanent record of recent changes, yet unlike a CD or floppy disc, cloud storage can be accessed from anywhere. With the relevant permissions, files can also be viewed by other people, which is ideal for sharing and revising work documents with off-site colleagues.
So Much Storage
Cloud storage still involves hard drives, but on a far larger scale than the 2.5-inch hard drive discs or 3.5” floppies of yesteryear. Banks of storage machines known as servers populate temperature-controlled warehouses in strategically-chosen locations around the world, containing data for thousands of people and companies at once. This information is constantly backed up to protect loss or damage, though data centers are extremely secure buildings in their own right. While many customers might have cloud storage facilities on the same drive, servers are partitioned so files will never be visible to (or accessible by) strangers. Cloud-hosted data is also normally encrypted, for added security.
The proliferation of cloud-hosted software solutions is leading more and more companies online, in a process often called ‘moving to the cloud’. Instead of spreadsheet or word processing documents needing to be emailed between colleagues, for instance, Google Docs and Office 365 create files in the cloud where they can be accessed and edited by anyone with the appropriate credentials. Cloud-hosted software is typically cheaper and easier to manage than licensed software requiring machine-by-machine installation, and it’s always accessible – providing there’s a stable internet connection with no data usage restrictions…