What is Cloud Computing?

You hear a lot about “The Cloud” these days. What is cloud computing or cloud storage?

Simply put, cloud computing is a term that refers to accessing resources that live on the Internet rather than in a particular hard drive or machine. A common example would be YouTube. The videos that you watch on YouTube are located on the Internet — the Cloud— rather than on your hard drive. I use cloud computing when I listen to my music through Amazon Cloud or read a book on my Kindle app. Google Docs is another example of cloud computing. The documents you access on Google Docs live on the Web rather than in your hard drive. Dropbox is another good example of cloud computing.

Why use cloud computing? I can think of three reasons: the data is mobile, transferable, and easily accessible. I can get to documents I have stored on the Cloud through the Dropbox app on my phone, my laptop and my desktop. That is pretty handy if you are like me— always on the run and definitely paper-challenged!! If you have a presentation to give, you may want to consider storing that PowerPoint on the cloud rather than on a disk or a thumb drive (or in my case 17 floppy disks back in the day.. ONE PowerPoint!)

For more about Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage, check out this video!

“Cloud Computing in Plain English” -video- http://www.commoncraft.com/video/cloud-computing