Do you actually understand what exactly the cloud is, or how it works? There's no shame -- it's confusing. To clear things up, here are a few things you should know:
The cloud is not a physical object
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You cannot reach out and touch “the cloud.” You probably hear about "the cloud" frequently and think of a single, huge computer that holds trillions of files, but rather it’s an enormous network of servers all around the world that we are all constantly saving and retrieving data to and from via our high-speed internet connections. Amazon has its own cloud; so do Apple, Google and a lot of other companies. "The cloud" is a generic term to describe whichever company's network of servers to which you connect.
What Is the Cloud Used For?
It’s taken the storage burden off your devices. Back in the day, if you wanted to save documents or photos, you had to save them to your computer's hard drive. That meant going through and pruning your Napster library, high school essays, and digital camera pics every once in a while to free up enough space in order to save something new or maybe you'd burn them to a CD or offload the big stuff to an external hard drive. The cloud makes sharing documents, photos and pretty much any type of file easy, using any device running any operating system. All you need is an Internet or cellular connection.
Storage Space?
Although the big cloud storage companies are minting money off of our storage needs, looking at you Apple. (Apple's getting 99 cents a month from most of us who've hit our iCloud quotas), experts warn that we're hurtling toward a reality in which there won't be enough space in the cloud to stash all the data we're creating. Our ability to produce massive amounts of data is far outpacing how quickly we can build the servers to host it -- just think about how much space a single photo taken on smartphone takes up these days.
