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 business model selling space on it’s servers for your files. And that I use their servers as if they were my own. This is cloud storage.

But it’s not only about file storage. Amazon Web Services (and numerous other companies) provides computing services via the cloud. What this means is a developer or systems administrator could provision a server to use to power his or her web application, or to provide backup resources to use. This type of technology makes heavy use of virtualization. Virtualization is where one can have many virtual servers on one physical server. Amazon may have dozens of virtual servers on one physical server. In this way they can easily create servers for companies to use to provide their own web services to others. Some of the biggest web applications in the world run on Amazon’s Web Services.

The other use of The Cloud is syncing all of the devices and computers that we work on these days. It is very much a first-world problem, but I need to keep my iPad software in sync with my Macbook and with my PC at work. Cloud enabled software will allow me (for example) to synchronize my calendar at work, to my calendar at home, to my calendar on my iPad, hopefully without require too much work from me except for the setup.

One advantage of The Cloud for the consumer is that with the growing ubiquity of Internet access and wifi accessibility, that you can access your files and services anywhere, anytime. No longer do you have to worry about if you remembered to bring your USB flash drive with your files when your files are available in the Cloud. As long as you have Internet access, then you have your files. I use Dropbox religiously, I have use project management software online to keep track of what I need to be doing, and I use Apple’s iCloud to keep all my Apple devices in sync.

A couple of downsides of The Cloud are privacy and security.

When you are storing your information in the Cloud you are storing it on someone else server, which probably means storing it another country (most often the United States). There are privacy issues to this, do you want to store your sensitive data on someone else’s computer? And there have been several mayor incidences of data theft from large corporations recently, where servers and networks were broken into and individuals critical personal information was stolen, most probably by hackers attached to global crime syndicates. Aside from theft there is also the concern that if the company where you are storing your data goes belly-up, then what happens to your data? Some better companies allow you to back up your data locally, but they are actually few. It is a concern that has to be taken seriously, and one that I usually try to hedge by only dealing with well-established companies.

Once these concerns are heeded, then you can have a lot of success with Cloud services. They are here to stay, and for good or for bad will become so ubiquitous and invisible that we will hardly know that we are using them soon.