To the Cloud!! Where? What cloud?

After a few heavy days talking about passwords, we will have a nice light day today.


So where is this "cloud" that every one talks about, "To the cloud!", "Icloud", "skydrive", does all our stuff just float around up there somewhere?. I had a friend ask me a while ago "Where is the Internet?" Its a very good question.


All the information that exists on the Internet has to be stored somewhere, information is stored on hard drives, just like the one in your computer, but usually a lot larger in capacity.
These hard drives may be located on their own, or be part of a large group of drives stored in the one place, these are known as "server farms" and maybe located anywhere throughout the world.


The hard drive is connected to a server, the servers job is basically to serve up the information to you, when you type in a website address it goes to a particular server who finds the information on the hard drive and sends it to you.


The "cloud" as every one refers to now, is just a group of hard drives somewhere that belong to who ever the company is that is offering the service. These companies offer you a certain amount, or block of storage on one of those hard drives. Its possible to go online and get access to use these blocks of space for free up to a certain data limit, if you want more storage you can pay a fee or sign up to a service. 
Companies like google, amazon, Microsoft, apple, dropbox,and many many more have this resource available.


Cloud storage can be used in two ways, as an online backup resource or as storage where you are able to log in from any computer or smart phone and access your information. This can be a good way to share things like photos, or documents with friends and family. There are sites out there where your storage is specifically for photos, flickr, picnic, photobucket, are three of the well known ones. 


There is upsides and downsides to using cloud services, the upside is once your information is up there it is safe from being lost forever if your computer dies, or in the case of floods or fires or coffee spills!.The down side is you are relying on the security of the provider to keep your material private, for this reason and for the reason of longevity it is always better to stay to the big name providers, and never store sensitive material online.


One important point to think about when you are considering using an online storage facility is that somehow the data has to get up there as well as be retrieved. this is known as uploads when you put it up and downloads when you bring it down. You need to know your Internet plan that your'e on and how much upload and download data you are allocated every month. On a lot of plans the upload limit is smaller and the speed is often slower, so this will make it longer to put your data  up to your storage. This is changing now as online storage becomes more popular, but its best to check with your provider and always try and do your transferring of data at off peak times when it will move faster.


So now you know what the cloud is, don't hesitate to ask me any questions you may have.