Cloud

=Cloud= Ryan Garrison

What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud is a virtual way to minimize costs and utilize resources by offering storage and software space on a single virtual server somewhere else that is run by another company. A cloud service provider offers storage space for applications, software, files, and whatever else you might normally store on a computer. When cloud services really show the bang for the buck is when a corporation has to buy a software licensing fee for each and every employee to use an application within a certain corporation. What a cloud offers that corporation is the ability to only buy one piece of that software and simply store it in a virtual server somewhere else that every employee can access it to use it. Therefore the costs have just been drastically decreased (not to mention the server space/costs) and yet every employee still has the exact same software that they did before. Cloud servers also allow the ability to transfer files easily across any distance imaginable. Most files are often too big to be sent through email and you cannot always send a physical copy of the file in the amount of time it needs to in order to be properly utilized. What cloud services are offering the common consumer and corporations is the ability to have a common cloud that files can be put onto in order to allow others to access them whenever they need them. This cuts down on time, and money to transfer large files across the country or even across the world.



As the image above shows, the process of cloud computing still works with the normal pieces of a server system that offers information to multiple computers on the network. Yet instead of these physical pieces of hardware all existing in the company's four walls, the storage for the software and any files exists "in the cloud" (at a cloud company's servers in their building) and therefore can minimize the actual physical storage space that a company would need to have in their building. As mentioned before, this also reduces costs as a single application (such as Microsoft Word) can now be stored once on the storage server and yet can be used and accessed by all company employees who have access to that server.

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Sources: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031?page=0,0 http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cloud-computing/cloud-computing.htm (image source) http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372163,00.asp#fbid=0ZG2ZjD6I3Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_ms

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