The+Cloud

"To the Cloud" = a sexy way to say "to a (mysterious) server"

Cloud storage being provided by a lot of people.

Free is good enough. Available storage at:
 * www.dropbox.com allows you to create/control your own server infrastructure
 * www.box.net box.net has emailable dropbox available
 * www.evernote.com allows offline access (good for students who cannot access Internet outside of school)

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The idea of the cloud is basically that we will be using unseen servers “the cloud” to store information, etc rather than using our own computers and servers. The positive side of this is the ability to access your documents from any computer or mobile device. The negative side is the loss of actual control over where your documents and data are stored. The “Cloud” couldn’t have happened without the PC Intel processor and Blade Servers, fiber optic & tcip This is the biggest change in 50 years in IT Management The “Big Switch” to cloud technology is similar to the electricity revolution – small towns built mills on rivers to obtain electricity. Edison came along with the idea that if they built central mills which would produce a lot of electricity that the small towns could buy via a power grid, the towns which weren’t on the river could obtain electricity. There is a big security issue – German data for German citizens cannot be taken out of Germany, but apparently American data doesn’t have the same restrictions. Amazon built up so much computing and storage power to handle their sales data that they sell it “cloud” space right now. They sell server space. The problem is that the “cloud” storage/server is expected to fail in a major way at some time. Everyone looking at a cloud server company needs to READ the FINE PRINT very carefully. Many companies will HOOK the buyer with a “price per user” fee which the company will change to a “price per transaction” at some point once a period of time has passed. Disney spends $2 million to protect credit card data to avoid problems with Disney customers. They don’t worry about other things, but they are extremely cautious with data which is now SECURE and needs to remain that way. Cloud technology/ industry is young/ so hard to check quality Lots of “buyer beware” issues SaaS – Software as a Service (Server provides apps) Ex: Google and GoogleDocs TaaS: Infrastructure Amazon model “rent” server space from whoever for a relatively low fee…. PaaS – Platform as a Service. Microsoft absorb – service will provide some type of platform DON’T PUT CLASS 1 DATA IN CLOUD EX: customers’ credit card data, sensitive, confidential data There will be major problems with losing data in a cloud. This was from one of the programmers who now sells cloud space!