Understanding The Cloud – Beginner Guide

While surfing the Internet or having a discussion with a technical colleague or friend, you may have at some point or the other heard about the word “Cloud / Cloud computing” and it’s association to storage, In your curious state, you try to find out it’s meaning but really all that Technical grammar in the explanation never gets to you

What Exactly Is The Cloud?

Your typical technical blog will describe it as “ a computing-infrastructure and software model for enabling ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable resources (such as computer networks, servers, storage, applications and services),which can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet.”

No, Really, What Exactly Is The Cloud?

To break all that down, you first need to understand the Cloud isn’t a physical thing (neither is it the cloud up in the sky) you get to use like a safe.
“The cloud” is simply all of the things you can access remotely on the internet as an individual. The saying “something’s being stored in the cloud” simply means it’s being stored on a server or multiple servers built by another individual in a particular location rather than your normal PC’s hard drive or Phone’s storage.

We make use of the cloud in some of our daily activities but have little or no idea we’re really doing that. Here are a few examples of how we use the cloud:

1.Making use of Google drive / Dropbox / Evernote / iCloud for different activities all sum up to interacting and making use of the cloud
2.Uploading a picture to your favorite social media accounts e.g Instagram simply means uploading to the cloud (how else do you think, you’ve been able to re-visit your account and still find your pictures there?)
3.Making use of web-based email services e.g Gmail, yahoo mail etc. Web based email services all have their emails stored on servers which allows you access your mails without internet connection or your mailbox from any PC anywhere! It also means you’ll be able to recover your emails if something happens to your computer.

Some of the popular cloud storage services available used to host data online include: Google Cloud, Amazon web services(AWS) owned by Amazon which has been around since 2006 and is used by a host of popular sites including Instagram and Pinterest

How Big Is The Cloud?
Unlike our local storage on our PC’s or Phones which have a storage limit, the storage limit for a particular cloud service is limitless, no one knows the amount of space that can be created but according to an infographic, the cloud can store up to 1 Exabyte

How Safe Is The Cloud?
With growing concerns in personal information being compromised, many individuals get worried about making use of them, but Some Companies like Google are tackling that with their data encryption for paid cloud storage users.

Benefits Of working with The Cloud?
There are immense benefits associated with working with the cloud, the biggest being how it allows you store and access data(large or small) remotely from any location without having to worry about storage space. It also allows large companies run efficiently and cost-effective while scaling up or down on data size:

1.File sharing: You can share files with several people at the same time. e.g you uploading several photos to Flickr or iCloud Photos, and then sharing them with family and friends

2.Data Backup: You can also make use of the cloud to protect your files. Several applications these days proffer the option of automatically backing up your data to the cloud. This way, if your PC or Phone gets lost, stolen, or damaged, you can get to recover these files from the cloud.

3.File storage: You get to store all type of information in the cloud, including files and email. Which allows you access them from any computer or mobile device with an Internet connection, not just your home computer. e.g Dropbox and Google Drive

originally posted on my medium publication here