Clouds?

A cloud is basically a virtual storage device. It's becoming more and more common and I believe most of the talk has been about the upcoming apple cloud.

Cloud computing is when you can access something from multiple computers over the internet. For instance, your email is a cloud. It's saved on a different server which you can get to through the internet.

LATELY the reason why "clouds" are getting some coverage is because of (I think) technology to let you take your personal hard drive and access it through other computers. Not just your hard drive, but your television service as well (you can watch TV online if you have the right service), and probably other technologies.

Think massive storage and computer processing power "out there somewhere" -- massive server farms connect to each other and to the web.

If your internet connection is fast enough and sturdy enough you can stream music, movies, tv... do work, write, and store all your stuff "in the cloud".

What is "sturdy" and "fast" enough? The average smartphone package, in a city, can handle it.

There are lots of pros and cons to consider, but that's the nutshell.

ETA: In my day world -- rural school systems, bandwidth is MUCH cheaper than hardware, and repeatedly updating software on the machines is labor and money expensive. The cloud offers some interesting money saving and resource flexible opportunities.

We're building one in Illinois, managed and shared by K-12 schools across the state. Currently, we're testing it out -- running email, student management and reporting, and disaster recovery for a number of schools.

It's just a fancy word for computing over the internet. Think of the services that Google offers. They're services or storage you use over the internet rather than on your own machine. That's the cloud.

But like anything else, using clouds does not mean you should not have back up systems in place for all you files...

thothguard51 said:

But like anything else, using clouds does not mean you should not have back up systems in place for all you files...

Click to expand...

Quoted for truth.

Using cloud storage means you abso-friggin-lutely need an alternate local-where-you-can-fondle-your-data backup.