What is the “Cloud” or “Cloud Computing?”

This question is asked by millions of Americans daily. All of us in the technology industry throw these terms around like our audience is supposed to know what this means because it is the latest and greatest workflow for IT. I have been guilty of this myself and within our company when talking to clients. I can sometimes tell that when I say things like “We can setup a server in the cloud to serve your website images.”, that my client has no clue what I am talking about and thus I explain. Other times the client may have a good poker face and not reveal their confusion to me. Either way I want to start out by apologizing to all of you that have experienced this with Alpha Omega Design or another company. So lets jump right in…

There are three main points in understanding what the cloud is and I am going to talk about them here.

1. The “Cloud” is not some unknown, far off place where data (Internet content) goes to live in a special world. The cloud is data centers, and lots of them. One of the main ideas behind the “Cloud” is that data can be stored in multiple (Redundant) locations and be accessible in multiple other locations. These “Clouds” can more efficiently store and deliver your content to the services you love. Some services that you probably already use that utilize cloud technologies are Apple, Google, Amazon, Roku, Netflix, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, and Alpha Omega Design.
2. The “Cloud” is not only data centers but, it is also made up of compute, storage, and networking infrastructure. To you the average person this may not mean a lot but, it greatly affects those services that you love to use. By it’s very architecture the “Cloud” is more efficient at doing the tasks that typical infrastructure handles. For example, lets says that everyone is tweeting #AODesign in response to an Award that our company has won. All of the tweets cause our website traffic to triple or quadruple. Our site starts to become unreachable because of all of the traffic coming to it. Instead of starting up another computer (“Server Instance” to us Nerds) to split the load, if we are utilizing the cloud, it scales up the computers automatically based on preset traffic guidelines. Now that’s cool! It’s better for you and it’s better for us. This same principles applies to storage, computations, applications, and many other tasks that are handled by the “Cloud.”
3. The “Cloud” is a safe place. In recent years there have been some breaches in specific applications that are cloud based but, these breaches were not a result of the architecture of the cloud but, of the applications. Just like any other web based service available, cloud services are as safe as the security policies of the companies that provide them. As with any product you should do your part as the consumer and ask questions about the service either to the service provider themselves or other people that have used the service. There is one thing to keep in mind is that things on the internet should always be assumed as public. If you don’t not want things you place on the internet to become public, don’t upload them to the internet.

I hope that this brief overview of the mysterious “Cloud” will help you to understand on a basic level what the cloud is. In future blogs we will discuss how the cloud works in more detail. Alpha Omega Design uses a mixture of Cloud based and standard services to provide for the needs of our clients. If you are thinking about utilizing a cloud service either personally or for your ministry or business we would love to talk to you. You can leave us a comment below and we will respond as soon as possible.