He rolled his eyes and tried not to look distrustful. “I’m not sure about all this ‘cloud computing’ nonsense. It seems to me it’s just a passing fad and a huge security risk. I’d never trust my important stuff there. I’d only put my files on my own computer. I like to know where they are so I can get to them when I need them.”
His friend responded with a wry grin. “Do you have a bank account?”, he asked.
The cloud sceptic replied, “Yes, of course I do.”
“Well… what do you think that is? Do you think your pile of money is sitting in your very own little personal vault somewhere with your name on it?”, he smiled.
“No”, he continued, “your money is nothing more than a record in a computer database, a series of 0s and 1s kept on a server somewhere as a series of magnetic codes. You don’t know where your money is kept or what sort of machine it’s kept on, or who maintains it, or how often it’s backed up. You don’t know what operating system it uses or what type of database it is. You just know that when you go to the ATM, money comes out the slot. That’s all that matters. You don’t need to go to the same bank that you deposited at, and you don’t get back the exact same pieces of paper that you put into the account. All you know is that you put your stuff somewhere, and then you can access it from anywhere.”
That’s what the cloud is.
The Cloud by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
It’s not that simple. I have proof of the money in my bank account in the hard-copies which I get from my bank every week. With the hard copy I can go to a branchoffice to get my money, in case the online system does not work. With everything I own in the cloud I’m like a duck in the water if only one link in the chain fails.
The difference is that banks have been doing it for a very long time, and rarely introduce new technologies without extensive testing. Do all cloud services do the same?
Love it Chris!
I see the cloud as an easy way to back up my work at home, at school, on my Mac, pc, share with my colleague, other Chinese teachers around the world….the list goes on! It’s not the only place I back up to though as I’m in a government school and much of the cloud is blocked…