My dad has asked me to help move his business “on cloud” (whatever that means) and I’m having major trouble understanding all the terms given online!
In: Technology
You have some IT infrastructure set up at your home and/or workplace. Might be file- or media servers, might be a hosted website, might be collaboration tools or timekeeping software.
Now a good internet connection might allow you to simply pay someone *else* somewhere out there in the world to provide the physical infrastructure to run those services. The business saves on maintenance and (possibly) local physical space at the cost of relying on a 3rd party host. Usually that 3rd party (a professional datacenter) has a better redundancy than any small or medium business though.
“The cloud” is really just a computer, or a network of computers, that’s not located in your home or office. You pay someone else to let you host your data on their system rather than hosting it on your own. This way you need not worry about your hard drive failing or something like that.
What this means is instead of hosting a website or data locally on a server located at your business, you instead use a cloud provider such as AWS, google cloud, or azure to host it or perform other services.
Sometimes this is more expensive, it depends what you’re doing and what you already have. Billing can become really complex.
Imagine something happens and a fire burns down your dad’s business and computers are destroyed. How quickly can he get everything back, including business records?
Storing something in the “cloud” just means it’s stored somewhere else on some other computer/server, and you can retrieve it whenever you want, as opposed to storing it “locally” on your own computer/server.
At the simplest level, it’s renting servers from other people.
But renting servers isn’t “cloud”. People were renting servers long before “cloud”.
“Cloud” means renting servers *through a fast automated system*. So if you need another server to handle more traffic, you don’t have to sign a contract, you can just press a button and get one within a couple of minutes. And when you don’t need it any more, you cancel it and you don’t have to pay for the whole month, just the time you had it for.
Before “cloud”, companies had to guess how many servers they needed and sign a contract for that many servers. With “cloud”, they can just ask for more as they need them. Like, Netflix has more servers when everyone is at home, and less when everyone is at work. Because they rent them *by the minute* from Amazon. Great flexibility for them.
It’s not just servers, it’s also other things like storage (hard drives). Amazon has this service where you can upload files and never ever run out of space. They charge you for the space you use, not the space you don’t use. Automated, fast and simple. Again, on traditional storage services you have to sign a contract for the amount of space you want, and they reserve that much space just for you, but with “cloud” storage, you just use as much as you need and get a bill afterwards.
They often have a bunch of side products too, like cloud AI, cloud databases, cloud video streaming. (Nothing you couldn’t build yourself using cloud servers)
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