Cloud Technology- The word frequently listened in modern days of technology. Cloud technology is anything you get to work through internet. Cloud stores the data in the data servers or the real machine you can work on. Cloud technology is very helpful in storing your data in data servers which aren't owned by you. At first gmail called itself a cloud technology giving a free storage of 6 GB 10 GB for every user. Cloud services help users to access the data anywhere, anytime, on an any machine with internet access. The only thing an user need to do is to trust a server, store his data and just forget about it.
We can call photo sharing web-sites like Picassa, Flickr; mail offering sites like gmail, Yahoo!; file hosting sites like mediafire, rapidshare, etc.. as cloud services. The advantage with cloud services is that you need not fear that your data might be lost due to technical snags in your machine in the future. Cloud services acts as backup to your important documents that can be retrieved anytime.
These are just starting days for cloud services. With post-PC products rushing in to the market, cloud services moved to the next level. With cloud services on the go, you need not have great hardware support to your devices. For example, if your media on whole is lot compared to memory size of the device you carry, cloud services will be the savior for you. All you need is a reasonable speed for internet.
And its not just limited to memory size, but also for the processor. If your device doesn't do the needful to you, computers in the cloud do the work. For example, in an iPad, if you cant run flash , the flash animations can be shown to you with the help of a computer that is present in the cloud. There is an App for that (iSwifter) We can also run Microsoft Office using App like On Live Desktop. So without having all these soft-wares installed on your device, you can do the total work with the help of devices that are on the cloud.
Apple Inc, has takes these cloud services further by providing many services to users as a freebie naming the service as iCloud. Key features of iCloud are:
- You can download any song on any device and just leave. The other iOS devices automatically download the song for no extra charge. All you need to do is sign in with the same account on all the devices.
- You can take a pic on your iPhone and it automatically appears on your iPad and your Mac without you doing anything. It automatically and wirelessly pushes all your content to all the device straight away. We can forget syncing these devices again and again.
- We can work on a presentation or read a book on an iPad, keep it in office and can continue the work on an iPhone from where we have left.
On the down side, security is a problem with cloud services. If the security gateway of just one data server is manipulated, much of the confidential information you have already stored in that server will be in wrong hands. Authentication should be strengthened in cloud services.
With cloud services, a cheap smartphone or a tablet can do all the work a computer does. All you need is a blazing speed for the internet so that we can greatly rely on these cloud services for day-to-day needs. In a word a Cloud technology enables a tablet user to work on a computer, he doesn't know where it is but gets his work done.
