Introduction to Cloud Technology.

Even if you retrieve my phone from me, I have these documents in the sky

These were the words of a woman who wanted to express how she has secured some videos that could serve as pieces of evidence in court. With her fingers pointing to the clouds, I began to imagine if truly cloud technology is about having documents flying into the sky and being saved there. This is a misconception out there that a good number of people have. They believe that when they put their document in google cloud, or iCloud, the document metamorphosis into the air or network signal then vanishes into the sky. But this is wrong.

Some uncommon facts about cloud technology.

• Your laptop could be someone else’s cloud.

I am sure you are as surprised as I was before I got a hold of this concept. Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing. To avoid ambiguity, I'm avoiding every technical term in order to accommodate beginners in cloud technology. Going by the definition from Wikipedia, if you can offer someone your computer data storage, power and processing power on-demand, you are up and running for cloud computing. To clarify things, whenever and wherever you hear CLOUD COMPUTING, let it run through your mind that someone somewhere is offering their own computer resources(like the memory, data storage, power and CPU) for your use. No matter how big the cloud technology company is, their main goal is to offer you these resources in return for money.

• Your data is not 100% secured in the cloud.

This might be hard to believe but it is true. From point number one, in as much as someone (say Microsoft Azure) is offering you their computers to use, if there is a severe disaster, you might lose your data. That is why these companies have chosen to replicate your data across regions, zones and sets of computers. There’ve been reports of various breaches of cloud platforms, 2020 saw a spike of cyberattacks on cloud platforms. So it is not guaranteed that your data is completely saved. But due to the level of service these platforms are willing to offer, they go the extra mile to protect your data.

• With cloud technology, there’s never a downtime.

  All cloud computing providers offer what is known as service level agreement(SLA) that details the estimated amount of time it will be possible for them to experience downtime in their systems. This usually states who bears the cost of the downtime and how to report an excessive downtime. There are extreme periods where these downtimes surpass what is in the SLA. An example is a downtime experienced by Amazon in November where some regions weren’t able to access their applications on amazon web service.

Conclusion

Although cloud computing is more than just offering computing resources, a basic concept around understanding cloud computing is imagining that you are offering people your laptop but they connect over the internet. They have their own quota of RAM, CPU, and Drive that is allocated to each of them. We will continue with some common terms you often hear when you venture into cloud technology.

NB: Not all remote connection to a computer is cloud computing.