The Cloud seems to have become ubiquitous doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems as if every other advert I see in web, financial and business type magazines are all about data hosting and cloud computing. Companies offering us ‘cloud this’ and ‘cloud that’. Clouding our judgments some might say…
Perhaps, with this in mind, are these are the kind of conversation we could expect to have in the not too distant future… “Where’d you get them trousers? I got them in the Cloud”. Or maybe, “Where do you kids go to school? They attend the Cloud.” And I can definitely see this one happening, “What kind of car do you drive? Oh, who me? I drive the Cloud.” And I might very well reply that of course you drive the Cloud because the Cloud is Where. It’s. At. And I will believe you because (whispering) I don’t actually know what that means… so you MUST be right. Right?
Hmm, so I think it’s fair to say, many of us may need a little more clarity on the situation. Just what is the Cloud and what is cloud computing and what does it look like and what does it do? I may sound like a child writing this but sometimes I just need a simple piece of information, a venn diagram, (if you could that would be great) about how this whole thing works.
When I first heard about it, oooh not that long ago, I had an image of the sky, full of busy, buzzy bits of information, images and songs invisibly flying all around us, much like the cars in The Jetsons, but tiny and not actually there. Clearly I am not scientifically minded.
One function I do actually know about and use as small business owner is hosted exchange email. I write the emails. I receive emails on all my devices. Brilliant. The security systems, data storage, software and backups are all based elsewhere by which we mean the Cloud. By not hosting files in my office but remotely, I am freeing up my space, life and time for other, more important things and allowing me to run an IT infrastructure at a fraction of the cost if I had to purchase all my own servers, hardware and very own IT manager (thank you Giacom!).
The reality is that when people refer to the Cloud, they could be talking about a million different functions, definitions and systems that it relates to and I am pretty sure that this is not a one-blog post answer but it’s a start and hopefully I’m heading in the right direction. So whilst I am confused and mildly cloud-illiterate, I am still rocking the Cloud as we speak, judgments relating to this very much unclouded. It’s great and makes my life better. All I can hope for in the future is a little more understanding and a touch of cloud clarity to come.
Tags: Business, Cloud, computing, information technology, IT, newbie, Saas, services, tech, technology
