You may have heard people talking about the online cloud, looked up in the sky and been a little confused. After all, what is the cloud? Where is it? And, how does it work?
So, in its most basic form, the cloud is a network of servers and hard drives around the world working as one massive hard drive. And every time you use Gmail or watch a show on Netflix you are accessing the cloud. Of course, you can also back up your documents and photos to the cloud as well.
When you back up information to the cloud, files are sent to servers in data centres all over the world. You can access these servers by connecting to the internet. So, you can access your data anytime, anywhere you're connected to the internet--even if you lose your phone.
Usually, companies like Apple and Dropbox offer you a few gigabytes of storage space on their servers for free. However, you might find that this is not enough space for you and your photos, documents and videos. This is where the business aspect of cloud computing comes into play. These companies that store your data will happily sell you more space on their servers to ensure all of your files are backed up securely. You'll have to decide whether this is a worthwhile subscription to add to your monthly billing.
One of the big benefits that we've not discussed yet is that the cloud allows you to offset how much data you store on your computer and your phone. If you decide to go totally digital and back everything up to the cloud, perhaps with a monthly subscription to a service, you no longer need to store your data on your devices, giving you the option of buying both a phone and a computer with less internal storage--and that could save you money.
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