Is Your Head In the Cloud?

“Actually this is just a place for my stuff, ya know? That's all, a little place for my stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time.”-George Carlin.

Finding ways to store your stuff is a challenge not only in the physical world, but also in the digital one. There is always the struggle to find enough space to store your data. For some people, the solution is to buy a bigger hard drive, for others it is using external devices such as flash drives and USB hard drives. I can recall a time when people stored their data on a series of floppy drives, graduating to Zip drives and then even to data CD's. The newest innovation on the data storage front is Cloud Storage. Cloud Storage is a new way to deal with the real challenges of data storage. Although there are still some concerns about its security and reliability, it is the first step in changing the way we think about data storage.

In a nutshell, using Cloud technology, a user can upload files and data to a Cloud server over the internet, and then access the files from any computer with internet access. Some of the chief advantages of using an off-site data storage hub is that the files are stored there until you need to download something, and in many cases, instead of having to buy more physical storage, you only need to pay for the services when you use them. This could, in effect, turn computer storage into a utility, where you pay by the unit. For example, if I were to upload my backup files to a cloud, when I found myself needing to use those files, I would just log on to my cloud and pay for the download of the needed files.

This sort of “elastic storage” works not only for individuals looking to solve storage problems, but also for web developers. Companies like Amazon have started offering Elastic Compute Cloud, where developers can use a cloud like a virtual computer. The benefit being that rather than buying a traditional hosting service, where you have to pay upfront to purchase storage for a fixed amount of time at a fixed cost, a user can have flexibility to have additional resources available instantly when needed, but still only pay for the resources that are being used. You can imagine it being like electricity, when you plug in lamps in your home, you know that there will be enough electricity to run the lamp, but you only pay for the electricity when you turn the lamp on. Using this analogy, traditional web hosting is sort of like paying ahead of time for 6 hours of lamp usage when most days you only need 4 but don't want to risk not having light when you need it.

Although there are still some problems with using the cloud for all your data storage, it has the potential to change how we think about data storage not only for our personal files, but for hardware as well. If you want to find out more, or play around with the cloud, one of the more popular servers is Amazon's Elastic Cloud. Take a look, and get you head in the Cloud.

By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a freelance writer and regular contributor to several websites and other publications, a volunteer, a full time mom and an active job seeker.