Everyone seems to say “It’s in The Cloud” these days and point up to some imaginary thing. What exactly is “The Cloud” and should you use it? Should you use it for your backups? Let’s find out.
“The Cloud” really means the Internet. Large and nebulous it’s that connection between you and other places out there. You use it to send mail to someone else, you use it to look at websites and facebook.com, you use it to stream movies to your television. What does the Internet look like?
The Internet for the US looks something like this. The “backbone” on top and the connections to each city. This image doesn’t even get to municipalities and houses. It’s complicated!
Worldwide city-to-city connections at a very high level look something like this:
Pretty maybe, but would be difficult to add to a corporate network map, so as far back as 1994 it just became “the cloud” and in Microsoft’s Visio program that is used to visualize network maps it looks like this:
Do I need the Cloud?
Every time you turn your computer on you are connected to the Cloud. The WIFI connection on your laptop in your home is connected to your Internet Provider and gives you instant access to search, browse, Skype, connect, and stream. Your smartphone connects to the Cloud via your phone provider. Whether you like it or not you are connected to, and using, the Cloud.
Why use The Cloud for Backup?
The Cloud is always there and always on. You only lose connection to the Cloud (the Internet) when you turn off your computer generally. The advantage is that “Here” can talk to “Out There” at any time and because it’s “Out There” it means it’s in a different location than “Here”. This is a perfect scenario for backups!
Backups is your protection from something disastrous happening and losing important information. A common law of computing is “Never put something in only one spot”. Disks fail, computers die, you need to be able to go and retrieve that information from somewhere else.
Sure you can copy data to an external USB drive or a thumb drive. You can burn it to a CD or DVD and a lot of the time that’s enough and it’s available when you need it. The problem with that backup solution is that your copy is right beside your original data – you can reach for it it’s that close! What if something truly disastrous happens? Fire, Flood, Earthquake, these are things we don’t like to think about, but they do occur. What we need to do is to put our backup further away from “Here”.
So What is a Cloud Backup?
A Cloud Backup is really this: Connected to the Internet is a large server that you can connect to at any time using “The Cloud”. It enables you to take your data and now back it up to somewhere else, somewhere away from your physical location. Now not only do you have a backup, but you have one that’s available should something terrible happen at your location. It’s a better backup solution – in fact at a business or non-profit organization level it’s imperative!
What is The Cloud? It’s all those things available to you on the Internet. Use it to your advantage with a Cloud Backup and then all that critical data you need will be safer.