What is Cloud Computing

People keep asking me “what is cloud computing? – Well, cloud computing is basically information or data that is entered into the internet or ‘cloud’ and is made available to users anywhere in the world that have an internet connection. Cloud computing is constantly changing, but is really a network of servers and storage media that can be accessed by customers via the internet as needed. Customers can buy space on these servers and retrieve and share their personal or company data all over the world via an internet connection. There are a few drawbacks involved with cloud computing. If you have some data stored on the cloud as opposed to locally on your computer. (an example of this would be services like ‘dropbox’ ).If you needed this data in a hurry and there is an internet outage or problem, either in your local area or the area where your data is being stored, you are going to be out of luck and unable to get to this information. Most services have safeguards in place to reroute their service if they have a service problem in their area, but your local provider probably doesn’t. Another problem that may arise is that these service providers are at risk of malicious hacking attacks, mainly because they may host services for thousands of businesses, therefor becoming a more interesting target for hackers due to the volume of data that could be stolen, or the amount of damage and disruption that could be caused. Again these companies have impressive firewalls and other security measures in place, but, as we have seen nothing is truly unhackable! Having said that, cloud computing, in my opinion, is a great innovation and is the way everything will eventually go. It will not be too long before we have devices, workstatons etc that have no local apps and data, they will all just hook up to the nearest cloud server