In the past few years, we have witnessed the boom of smart
devices. People are buying smartphones, tablets and notebooks like crazy. The
future looks great for electronics industry, but what about users? Think of a
situation like this- Mr X owns an iPad, MacBook and an iPhone. He stores
different data in different devices and one day he brings iPad to the office
but forgets the laptop! How can he access the data that he stored into the
laptop for presentation?
Many people may have gone through this trouble and that is
why, computer engineers started thinking about a solution. Can data be
accessible from anywhere? Several companies like Microsoft (SkyDrive), Google
(Drive) and Apple (iCloud) found an answer and that answer is cloud computing.
Now we can sync data from different devices, access it from any device that is
connected to internet and more importantly share it with anyone we wish to.
You may not realize it, but even Gmail is a cloud based
service. Once you upload and send a picture, document or MP3 file to anyone,
that data remains in your account and you can access it anytime even if it’s
deleted from your hard disc.
That is how our individual small data cloud connects to a
mother could and create a large database for everyone. Imagine that your
college is storing thousands of student details on Google Drive and individually you are
also storing your mark sheets to make sure that you never lose it. If you
forget the Drive account password and lost the hard copy of mark sheet, call
your college and they will share a copy within minutes. Cloud computing keeps
your hard disc space free and protects the data from malware, virus and hackers.
Another huge benefit of this service is data sharing security.
Users can decide with whom they want to share something and restrict the
permission for editing as well.
Lets see how a could computing works in real life. If you
own a Widows 7 computer, Widows 7.5 phone, then once you download a song in
your computer, it not only shows up in the computer’s Zune player, but gets
synced to all the devices. That means the same song is immediately added to the
Windows phone play list. Now, when you take an image using the mobile, it’s
immediately uploaded in the SkyDrive, Microsoft’s own data cloud. You can
access those images by going to SkyDrive from any PC without touching the
phone.
I know some of you must have started thinking, how much it
costs? After all, if I can store everything without worrying about my hard
disc, it must be pretty costly. Contrary to the popular notion, cloud computing
is quite affordable. For 50GB storage, iCloud charges $8.33, for 100GB, Google Drive
charges $4.99 and for 52GB space SkyDrive charges $2.08.
Cloud computing is not only good for common consumers, but
business houses as well. Large companies can store their data on cloud and use
it anytime. For instance, a web design company can store all the completed
design projects in Google Drive
and share it with clients once they send the final payment. This facility can
also be helpful for demonstration. Instead of carrying a laptop for
presentation, the BDMs can go to a client’s office, open any computer and
extract hundreds of design samples from Drive to impress prospective clients.
Cloud computing offers endless possibilities and breaks the
“storage” barrier. If you are using cloud computing, there is no need to carry
data, because it glides with you.
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