The Cloud

What is “the cloud”?  In technology terms, “the cloud” is not that puffy white cottonball of moisture vapor floating gently across the sky.  Instead, it represents storage devices that are physically located in data centers and accessible via the Internet.  Data centers are located across the country and throughout the world.  They house servers with redundant connections to storage devices and networks both within the data center and outside to the Internet.

Please understand that “the Internet” is not a single entity, but instead it is a conglomerate of interconnected networks all across the world.  Data centers have large bandwidth network connections to the Internet so that many customers can access their “cloud” of resources simultaneously from anywhere in the world – as long as an Internet connection is available.

So “the cloud” is not a mysterious puff-ball of technological cyberspace fluff, but instead it is real places with real equipment and real people managing each individual location.  When you store data in “the cloud” you are actually allowing it to be stored on real servers in someone’s data center somewhere, but not “somewhere over the rainbow”!