THE phrase "it is saved in the cloud" is one heard on an almost daily basis but what does this buzz term of the technology world actually mean? For many people, the intricacies of cloud computing remain as mystical and intangible as the lost city of Atlantis, conjuring up a vague visual image of rows of filing cabinets floating in a fluffy cotton wool-like space.
Yet, most of us will likely have had some experience of it in one form or another be it mobile phone data back-up such as iCloud, file sharing via Dropbox or entertainment services such as Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.
To simplify it, the cloud is essentially accessing any internet-based services such as storing files, running programs or streaming media.
Here's three ways in which cloud computing can enhance your life – made simple.
1 The cloud was initially adopted by large companies to cut local infrastructure costs across multiple sites. Instead of buying, housing and maintaining expensive servers at each location, the cloud allows everything to be hosted in one place.
Files stored in a data centre in London could be accessed by employees based in Dubai during their business hours but then utilised by colleagues in New York when those in Dubai had gone home.
2 Shared storage is not the only benefit to the cloud: imagine never having to install another program on your computer. Applications like Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop can chomp through your computer's memory and take up precious processing time.
Cloud services offer everything from a web browser so it is ideal if you have 600 workers all using the same program: you could even have them all work from home and save building costs.
3 The future scalability of the cloud is referred to as "big data" which is used to describe information so vast that special processes and hardware are needed to comprehend it.
The Google search engine index is a good example of this idea or looking beyond, a personal cloud could hold your entire life from video, passport and currency. Nothing physical need exist.
Those, for example, who typically save treasured family snaps on memory sticks – notoriously unreliable and easily lost – can have the added peace of mind of knowing there is a cloud-based back up for those precious memories.
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