The cloud. It’s a nearly ubiquitous term when we talk about technology in our lives today and is a part of just about everything we do. Yet for many people, there remains lingering confusion about exactly what the cloud is, and how it impacts their lives. So let’s take a look at some of the ways cloud computing is used in our lives every day.
Social media
With Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tinder, there’s a social media platform for everyone. It’s because of this that more than 15 million Australians are participating in one social network or another. They help us to stay in contact with family and friends, follow news and current events, shop and even help us find love. All of these social networks are cloud-based services and store user information in the cloud.
Entertainment
If you watch Netflix or YouTube, use Spotify to stream your music, or play games online, you’re using the cloud.
Healthcare
Controversy over the government’s approach to digital health records aside, the cloud is increasingly important to our health. Having online databases of patient records through the cloud allows doctors across the country to quickly access all the information they need to help someone, regardless of whether they’re the patient’s regular doctor or not.
Personal storage
If you use Dropbox or Google Drive to keep backups of documents or share work with colleagues, you’re using cloud services. If you back up all your precious photos online, you’re using the cloud. It’s impossible to avoid the convenience of cloud services for making sure that you never lose your most important digital data.
Impacts of cloud computing
Naturally, because of the ubiquity of the cloud, it’s having a major impact on our lives and online behaviors. For example, the cloud is pushing us to adopt ever-more substantial Internet connections. This is because streaming entertainment services often require a rapid bandwidth to function at their best, particularly if you’re streaming video in high definition. But it’s not just that. If you’ve got a large archive of high-definition photos, for example, uploading them all to a cloud storage service can take a while if you haven’t got good bandwidth.
Cloud computing is also helping us to become more aware of security than ever. Because the cloud is online, and because we’re putting ever-more personal information on there, being able to rely on the security of the cloud is paramount.
We’re also moving to different consumption models for everything as a result of the cloud. Previously you’d purchase a DVD or CD in exchange for ownership over that disc. Now, we’re moving to subscription models, where we pay a flat rate per month for access to everything, but ownership of nothing.
This sounds good when it means access to thousands of movies and TV shows, and millions of music tracks, but many people buy into those services without thinking about how they’re paying for the service and not actually good.
Overall, however, the convenience that cloud services represent, and the ability for cloud services to fit with our increasingly mobile and active lifestyles (being able to access any of your cloud services on your phone, for example), makes the cloud an indispensable part of our modern lives.
The cloud and IoT
The next thing you’re going to hear a lot about is the Internet of Things or IoT. IoT refers to something simple; its devices linked to one another through their connection to the Internet. Once upon a time a person’s online connectivity would start and stop at a computer, laptop, phone, and perhaps a tablet. Now, just about everything connects to the Internet in some way – from printers, refrigerators and televisions to light bulbs, household locks, and security cameras.
IoT can also include sensors that athletes wear in their clothing to monitor performance or heart monitors that can warn medical experts that a person’s at risk. IoT has the potential to improve the comfort, efficiency, and safety of our lives, and the connectivity of IoT devices is extremely beneficial to us.
And here is where the cloud comes in. For any IoT device to be successful, it needs to be connected to some kind of cloud solution. This cloud solution connects the devices together and allows users to interact with them over the Internet. Whether this is a personal cloud set up in the home and connected to all the household devices, or a third party cloud where data can be collected and analyzed, it’s the cloud that provides the underlying infrastructure to power IoT.
This, of course, means that security needs to be paramount. There have already been some real horror stories with IoT, such as when Chinese hackers were able to take control of a Tesla “ a car that’s also an IoT device thanks to its on-board computer and online connectivity “ and interfere with the car’s door locks and, most terrifyingly, breaks, which could pose a huge risk if the driver is operating the car.
But it’s not all doom and gloom
Still, the technology industry is well aware of the security risks of the IoT, and proactively looking for advanced solutions to protect users. For most of us, after weighing up the pros and cons of IoT, and its integration with cloud computing itself, the benefits of using the IoT will simply be too significant to ignore.
