What is the Cloud?

What is the Cloud?

A friend and I were talking the other day about the cloud, and I could see out of the corner of my eye that my mom had a very puzzled look on her face. After my friend went home, my mom embarrassingly asked me, “What is the cloud?” For all of you out there who are my mom’s age and a lot younger, don’t be embarrassed about not understanding the cloud! The cloud, cloud computing, cloud based networking, virtual cloud services – whatever you want to call it – is a relatively new term in the non-computer geek world. But, once it is explained properly, it’s not that hard to understand. Let me break it down for all my computer challenged friends.

Cloud computing means storing and accessing data (documents, databases, music, pictures) and programs (MS Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud) over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. That’s it. Instead of going to the good ‘ol C:Drive and your old school My Documents folder to access your Word document, Excel spreadsheet, videos, or pictures, you instead go to Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc… to access your saved items. And, if you need to type a report in Word then you can go to MS Office 365 to access your cloud based Office programs. Nothing is stored locally, it’s all stored on the Internet. Easy, safe, fast, and always computing.

How does this affect the business world? Good question! Many in the small and medium business market have already switched over to virtual private cloud services. This allows bosses and their employees to access their company’s network (files, documents, databases, pictures, email system, etc.) safely from just about anywhere. As long as they have access to the Internet, they can work from home, while on the road for a business trip, or sitting under an umbrella at the beach. It’s really that simple.

If you are a small business owner and you are interested in moving to the cloud, contact us today! Cloudspace USA is an all-in-one IT company who provides cloud services to SMB market.