Cloud Technology
What is cloud technology?
The term "cloud computing" is everywhere. In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the internet instead of your computer's hard drive. Ultimately, the "cloud" is just a metaphor for the internet. It goes back to the days of flowcharts and presentations that would represent the gigantic server-farm infrastructure of the internet as nothing but a puffy cloud, accepting connections and doling out information as it floats. What cloud computing is not about is your hard drive. When you store data on or run programs from the hard drive, that's called local storage and computing. Everything you need is physically close to you, which means accessing your data is fast and easy, for that one computer, or others on the local network. Working off your hard drive is how the computer industry functioned for decades; "cloud computing," you need to access your data or your programs over the internet, or at the very least, have that data synced with other information over the web. In a big business, you may know all there is to know about what's on the other side of the connection; as an individual user, you may never have any idea what kind of massive data processing is happening on the other end in a data center that uses more power in a day than your whole town does in a year. The end result is the same: with an online connection, cloud computing can be done anywhere, anytime.
Common Cloud Examples
When it comes to home use, the lines between local computing and cloud computing sometimes get blurry. That's because the cloud is part of almost everything on our computers these days. You can easily have a local piece of software (for instance, Microsoft Office) that utilizes a form of cloud computing for storage (Microsoft OneDrive). Microsoft also offers a set of web-based apps, Office (aka Office for the Web), that are web-only versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote accessed via your web browser without installing anything. That makes them a version of cloud computing (web-based=cloud). LINK: cloud-computing