The cloud is a visible mass of condensed water vapor, no “the cloud” is a representation of the internet and data storage on servers that are located all around the world, these servers are located on land and not in the air like regular clouds.
The name can be confusing but the concept for the internet and storage can be viewed like a matrix of servers that serve and store information. The infrastructure of the internet is complex and has many redundancies. The main companies that control the servers are Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple.
Cloud computing works on the same concepts of the “cloud” but can run applications using compute power processed on remote computers. Think of this like you use an image processing website that allows you to make changes to a picture you upload. The cloud computer is making those changes with little to no resources being used on the local PC.
Now that we understand a little more about the cloud, how does a business keep itself current with new cloud technologies but still safe when the internet eventually has issues? There are many solutions to this, but local redundancy of the critical data is your best option. There is also redundancy of the internet which I’ve spoken about in a previous episode. While the cloud offers convivence, plan to minimize any downtime.
On the next episode pulling “the cloud” down?