Do you ever question the “Cloud”? With the fast advancement of today’s technology it is of no surprise that you have doubts or concerns, especially with what seems to be a never-ending list of hacking and Cloud scandals in the recent months. We are here to give you some peace of mind about the Cloud as well as a few tips for keeping your information secure and free of fraud.
First let’s give a little background about the Cloud. Surprisingly enough, this mysterious Cloud is nothing new. It dates back to the 1950s when every computer was huge and servers took up the space of an entire room. As you can imagine, the equipment cost more a pretty penny so developers made “time-sharing”, which would allow more than just one user to access data and CPU time. Time-sharing was the foundation for today’s cloud computing. A few more advances were made during the ‘70s, but the Internet was not able to make the Cloud available to masses of people until the 1990s. Remember that term “cloud computing” that we mentioned? This came about in the late ‘90s with the help of a professor putting a name to the technology and Salesforce reinventing CRM.
Now that we have some background let’s dig into the Cloud.
The Cloud is not a physical item. It is made up of different servers with different functions that run applications and make services such as Adobe Creative Cloud available to us. Basically these networks of servers work to either provide service or store information. Instagram, Google Drive, SkyeDrive and Dropbox are all used for storing data on the Cloud.
The Cloud can save businesses money. Business leaders’ ears perked up at that one! One major benefit of incorporating the Cloud in your business is that you don’t have to waste money on buying the hard drives required to store data since it can all be accessible with application such as Asana.
The Cloud is not EVERYWHERE. Believe it or not, there are ways to limit or completely eliminate your use of the Cloud. Since it operates with the use of Internet you can keep your files and data on your internal hard drive to prevent uploading it to the Cloud. For email, you can use a traditional desktop email provider such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail instead of Cloud-based email providers such as Google (Google Docs is also a Cloud-based entity). So don’t get bogged down if you aren’t comfortable with the Cloud as you can limit your use based on your comfort ability.
