Is Your Head in the Clouds? Everything You Should Know About Cloud Computing and Storage!

A common question you might find yourself asking is, “what is cloud storage?” It’s okay to be confused because, all this recent hype about cloud storage is bound to create some confusion and give rise to some questions.

Cloud storage is actually a web-based storage system owned and managed by a hosting company. In cloud storage, the digital data is stored on logical disks, and the underlying storage space extends to several servers frequently at numerous locations. The cloud storage providers are accountable for keeping the data accessible, protected and running. People and organizations can buy or lease storage facilities from the providers to store user, group or application data. It works just like the hard drive of your PC, except, you can access the secured information from anywhere in the world from any device.

In general, cloud storage refers to a hosted object storing service. The term has now been widened to include other types of data storage as well. These stored data are available for a service like a block storage. Cloud storage consists of many resources but still acts as one. It is highly faulted tolerant through redundancy and circulation of data and very resilient through the formation of versioned copies.

So, is cloud storage completely reliable? Well, some concerns have been raised about this storage system, such as outsourcing. Some attack surface areas may pop-up here and there through outsourcing the data storage. An attack surface is a software environment, which is the summation of the total points or “attack vectors” where an illicit user or “attacker” can extract data. Put simply, outsourcing makes the storage system vulnerable to hackers. Also, performance dependability and accessibility for outsourced storage are liable to be worse than local storage. So the security of stored data comes into question because cloud storage is a loaded reserve for both hackers and national security agencies. But that doesn’t mean you should be afraid to use cloud storage. Loads of cloud storage services have very strict policies and are quite safe from these present concerns. All you need to do is find a reliable source for whatever you need with cloud storage. It could be for personal use,online backup,project management, businesses, etc.

In all fairness, I’d say that there is no definite “best cloud storage” service. You can just pick one according to your needs. There are plenty of data backup providers out there – far too many to introduce all in this article. But I’m going to try to familiarize you with a few popular ones.

By now, you must have heard about “iCloud”. Well, if you haven’t, it is Apple’s very own cloud storage service. It comes with means to store and share documents, photos, and music on remote servers for download to iOS, Mackintosh and Windows devices. Users can also manage their Apple devices from iCloud if lost or stolen. And the best part is that it does it all automatically.

You can personally log into your cloud account to delete the information or data you don’t want to keep. Other than that, your data will never go missing. And “Google Drive” is a similar cloud storage system for non-apple users. “Dropbox”, “Just Cloud”, “Sugar Sync”, etc. are also great for personal use.

On the other hand, cloud file sharing is gaining heaps of popularity in the small-medium business sector. Mainly because, it lets companies work without VPNs or file servers, which makes it easier to access their work data on their smartphones when employees are outside of their offices. It also cuts down on VPN cost, but it adds a bit of intricacy in managing files stored outside of an internal storage. But, that’s nothing an IT professional can’t fix. If you’re opting to go to the clouds to manage your business, the service I’d recommend is “Egnyte Hybrid Cloud File Sharing” from the cloud-based file sharing company Egnyte Inc. It lets almost ten thousand users simultaneously access the file sharing system and allows companies to extend up to 1 billion files per account.

If you’re wondering what a hybrid cloud is, it’s a combination that includes at least one private cloud and one public cloud infrastructure. Private clouds provide safe storage, since they are an organizations’ firewall, whereas public ones provide a multi-tenant storage system that’s most appropriate for amorphous data.

I hope this article has been helpful in answering your basic cloud questions and helped you learn a little about cloud storage.