It has become one of the most over-wrought terms in technology, bandied about by some who probably barely know what it means. And I must admit sometimes I myself wonder just what it means anyway, when the term seems to be used for everything from network enabled refrigerators to online banking systems. It is “The Cloud” I started hearing about The Cloud around seven years ago, at that time it was mostly a term for online file storage. Online computing power purveyors like Amazon Web Services hadn’t arrived yet. And The Cloud wasn’t the ubiquitous buzzword that it is today. So what is it? Speaking very generally, The Cloud is any computing resources that you use that are hosted by another company that you access via a network connection. Boiling that down for the lay-person, and to use a specific example – when I use the online file hosting service Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) I might connect to their servers through my web browser, log-in to their system, and upload or download files on my own personal file storage space on their servers. My files exist on their servers, which might reside in a server in a vast server farm somewhere in California, or Washington State, or who knows, even Norway. The import thing to understand is that Dropbox has as it […]