Do You Understand The “Cloud’?

There are so many questions we have about the “cloud” and it has almost become comical even that today’s youthful, technology-savvy individuals cannot get a handle on this concept. Maybe the reason why Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz’s new movie Sex Tape drew so much attention was due to the famous line in the movie’s preview “nobody understands the cloud”. Let’s change that shall we?

Cloud computing is a service that allows you to share resources on multiple devices. IBM, Google, and Apple, along with other companies all have cloud services. The cloud makes it possible to share photos, documents, videos, music, and other data on multiple devices such as your phone, computer, and tablet. It can be quite annoying to download a song three separate times just so you can have that song on all devices. The same goes for photos or videos that take up a lot of memory space. Cloud computing solves this problem!

When using Apple’s iCloud, for instance, there is a safety feature that if you happen to misplace or lose your device you can lock the device preventing another user from getting to your personal information. The iCloud can also back up data daily over Wi-Fi from any location (with Internet access). The iCloud is soon to feature an editing feature where you can work on any file from anywhere, and share to all devices.

There is not a huge differentiation between the Cloud brands as of now.  This might change in the near future, like most of the technology-wars do, as users require new features. A lot of people are hoping cloud computing will replace external hard drives when it comes to storage in general. The problem with this is that there is only so much available space on each individual’s cloud. This means that when the space available is used up, each user must purchase more space, and depending on how much memory is needed could add up quite a few pennies.

Cloud Computing is the future of technology, evolving so no data is lost and we can keep photos, videos, and songs for many years to come.