An Introduction to cloud computing

We use the cloud as a metaphor to describe the invisible, faraway places where almost all of our online data is stored. The concept of the cloud has led us to the term ‘cloud computing’.

You can access information from the cloud whenever you can access the Internet. All you have to do is login to your account by entering your username and password.

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There are a number of reasons why cloud computing characterises today’s Internet.

Firstly it makes good practical and financial sense to keep large amounts of data in a single place. The world’s largest tech-companies (primarily Google and Microsoft) have spent millions of dollars building vast storage centres with the capacity to securely store millions of different files.

As companies like this are happy to store your data (for free), it means that you can access it wherever you can connect to their servers.
This means that if you want to check you emails in Manchester – you can. If you want to check them in Cape Town – you can. In Moscow? Yup. You are never far away from the cloud.

This is not just good for you; it is also good for online businesses. The more people that they can tempt to use their products, the bigger customer-base they will have who they can exploit as an advertising audience.

Cloud computing allows us to store larger amounts of data than ever before. Do you remember the days when your email limit was just 2Mb? Every time that you received a large photo from a friend you had to quickly download it then delete it to prevent going over capacity.

The amount of data that we can now store in the cloud is staggering. Gmail gives ordinary users an email capacity of 7.39Gb – an enormous size if you consider that just a decade ago most computers had hard disc capacities of no more than 1Gb.

Cloud computing has made it possible to share large files: high definition photos, videos and MP3s. We wouldn’t have the modern Internet without it.

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The cloud is wonderful. It’s fast, free and unfussy. But what happens if it disappears?

Just image. One day your emails vanish, your photos are gone; you’ve lost all of your Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Everyone has disappeared in a flash into the digital mist.

This is the catch with cloud computing.

In Autumn 2008, the BBC sent Rory Cellan Jones (their technology correspondent) to Quincy, a town in the middle of Washington state. Microsoft had constructed a ‘brutally ugly’ building in the town to hold their servers.

Microsoft housed 300,000 servers containing millions of data files in this building. Cellan Jones described it as ‘the belly of the modern Internet.’

In the same way that Detroit became Motown, Quincy was becoming Data-Ville.

But what would happen if there was a problem at Quincy? If there was a flood, a storm, a fire or another natural disaster. Servers would be ruined, smashed or drowned. The cloud would be lost – and with it a frightening amount of personal data.

This has happened before. In January 2009 a bookmark-sharing website called Magnolia suffered a catastrophic data loss. The service lost both its primary store of user data as well as its backup. After a few days of desperately trying to salvage what they could, the site’s owners were forced to close the site altogether.

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Yes. To an extent. Cloud computing has made the modern Internet possible. Without it we would not be able to do many of the tasks – and use many of the services – that we take for granted.

But it is important to remember that you are trusting someone else with your data. By the terms of just about every single website, if your data is lost there is very little that you can do about it.

The best advice is to ensure that you always make backups of your most important files. You can buy a portable hard-drive and keep duplicate copies of your photographs and documents. Portable hard drives cost around £100 and are freely available in the UK and are easy to use.

Embrace the cloud, just don’t rely on it for everything.

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