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naples mac help

UNDERSTANDING
THE

CLOUD

Y ou can’t turn on the news, open a magazine or talk to a neighbor to access our files from. The old method was to save

the file to a USB flash drive and transfer it to another
without the ‘cloud’ appearing. What is the cloud and how can it be
useful to you?
it on another machine. But today, cloud computing
The cloud refers to software, files and services that run from the Internet, computer or email the file to yourself so you could open
instead of locally on your computer. Most cloud services can be accessed allows us to simply save a file on a remote server so it
through a web browser like Safari, Firefox or Google Chrome, and some can be accessed from any machine that has an Internet
companies offer dedicated mobile apps. For a lot of people, the experience connection.
of accessing files from anywhere is like pulling it down from the sky, or
HOW CAN YOU USE CLOUD COMPUTING?
“the cloud.”
Some examples of cloud services include Google Drive, Apple’s iCloud,
The most important features of the cloud for the
Netflix, Yahoo Mail, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive. From a physical
consumer are access and convenience. When you store
point of view, the cloud is a large group of computers (servers), storage,
documents, photos or music ‘in the cloud,’ you have
networking hardware and software connected to the internet. They are
access to these files wherever you are, as long as you have
usually stored in a ‘server farm,’ which is a group of networked servers that
a data or internet connection. No longer do you need to
are housed in one location. Apple, Amazon and Google have dedicated
go home to email photos that are stored on your hard
server farms that are measured in acres! These are usually in clusters of
drive, or burn a CD to listen to music in your car. These
buildings that can be spread over several acres.
can all be accessed from the servers where they reside
Before we had cloud storage services, we had to save
through almost any connected device. Having your files
all of our files to our computers, on our local hard drives.
on the cloud means that you can access your data from
These days, we have multiple desktop computers, laptop
any computer, tablet or smart phone almost anywhere.
computers, tablets and smartphones that we may need
Jeff Bohr | Naples Mac Help 239.595.0482 | jeff@jeffbohr.com