What is the cloud?

You hear a lot about ‘the cloud’, but how does it actually work?

The term ‘cloud’ implies something that’s above your head, but in reality the data

that you upload is likely to be stored very much at ground level or even underground,

and probably thousands of miles away from your location. A cloud service is actually a cluster

of computers: more accurately, a huge number of servers with vast amounts of hard drive

storage attached. It’s a natural evolution of the technology behind the internet itself and

has come about largely thanks to rapid improvements in global bandwidth and the

plummeting price of storage capacity. The internet is actually just a collection of data

centres – albeit many thousands – all connected through various global hubs and thousands of

miles of heavy-duty undersea cabling. As the web grew and companies like Microsoft, Apple,

Google and Amazon came to use it more and more for services, sales and software delivery, it

became necessary to build large server farms and data centres to cope with the sheer volume

of visitors and information they had to store and serve to users. Companies like Akamai grew

correspondingly, providing heavyweight video streaming and content delivery for

other big tech companies. Bandwidth isn’t free, and big telecoms firms. round the world own the physical infrastructure and charge your ISP for it. The idea that ordinary users could use cloud
storage began to take off as home broadband started to become widely available. Companies
would offer online file storage, but for a long time capacities were low and prices high. Apple’s
own early forays into the world of cloud storage were not entirely blemish-free, with iTools and
later .Mac and MobileMe failing to live up to the company’s reputation for ease of use. With
iCloud, that early vision has been much more fully realised. At the same time many other developers
(Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Box, to name just a few) built their own cloud syncing
and sharing services that usually work across Macs, PCs, iOS devices and often Android.
Though Apple and Microsoft have an interest in making their cloud services integrate specifically
with their own operating systems and hardware, third party developers want to be on all the big
platforms, which is great news for users because