I’ve heard of it but I don’t know what it is
“The Cloud” is one of the buzz words that has been around for the past few years. People are often doing things “in the cloud” and you’ve probably been told to copy your data “to the cloud” but what exactly are they talking about?
Back in the early days of inter-connected networks, before the ‘internet’ was coined, it was good practice to have a network diagram of your network of computers. As these were quite specialised and expensive areas of computing, the only places to have networked computers were universities, some research laboratories and big companies.
On the wall in the IT room would be a big diagram showing how everything connected together, how each terminal was connected to the mainframe, and how your network was connected to any other network (if, indeed, it was) – this would have been over leased telephone lines that were owned by the telephone company and so their workings were unknown to the IT technicians, they just knew that data went in, traversed somehow, then came out the other end, and so a picture of a cloud was used to show this ‘something somewhere’. Four decades later, some marketing team saw the cloud icon on a network diagram, and ‘The cloud’ was coined.
What can The Cloud do?
The best way to think about The Cloud in terms of what it can do, is to replace ‘The Cloud’ with ‘Someone else’s much bigger and more powerful computer’
Suddenly it’s not quite as fluffy and safe, so you’re going to use caution, right? Well you should because, as with all areas of life, there are unscrupulous people out there trying to make money from you any way they can, legally and illegally.
When using any service that is cloud based, be it to backup your photos, play games or chat with friends, always be aware of just who is receiving, processing, logging, viewing, saving and distributing YOUR data.
#WeCanHelp
Using ‘The Cloud’ has revolutionised the use of the internet, making smartphones much more usable, letting businesses spread their workloads and securing precious data. But always do research first, and use reputable providers.
We can help you identify if, where and how you are using The Cloud at the moment, we can design and implement secure and reliable services that meet your needs and we can help you check just who is able to get to your data.
[CONTACT US]