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The practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.
Cloud computing is essentially "network computing". You're utilizing computing services offered from a remote network (storage, processing, application, etc.).
In most cases, you are using a service accessible through the Internet. Thus, THE Cloud often refers to services you can access via Internet (Google, Dropbox, Box.net, etc.).
The name is newer than the concept. Cloud computing has been around long before it was called cloud computing. In the late 90's cloud computing providers were called Application Service Providers (ASPs).
Cloud computing is essentially "network computing". You're utilizing computing services offered from a remote network (storage, processing, application, etc.).
In most cases, you are using a service accessible through the Internet. Thus, THE Cloud often refers to services you can access via Internet (Google, Dropbox, Box.net, etc.).
The name is newer than the concept. Cloud computing has been around long before it was called cloud computing. In the late 90's cloud computing providers were called Application Service Providers (ASPs).
And before that it was called Remote Time Sharing.
You may have heard of Cloud Storage. Services like Google Drive and Drop Box fall into this category. You are saving files onto a remote server ("the cloud") where the files are accessible from basically any computer or mobile device. This is advantageous over saving files to a hard drive because if a hard drive fails you are likely going to lose your files. This is not an issue with cloud storage.
You may have heard of Cloud Storage. Services like Google Drive and Drop Box fall into this category. You are saving files onto a remote server ("the cloud") where the files are accessible from basically any computer or mobile device. This is advantageous over saving files to a hard drive because if a hard drive fails you are likely going to lose your files. This is not an issue with cloud storage.
Aren't files saved to, say, Google Drive still stored on hard disks?
Couldn't local storage be configured for redundancy (replication, deduplication, etc) so that the file is still accessible after a drive failure?
Couldn't local storage be configured for redundancy (replication, deduplication, etc) so that the file is still accessible after a drive failure?
Yes but you need two drives. You'd start with the computer itself and use two drives in a RAID1 array, they mirror each other. When you save something it's written to both drives. It's monitored and if there is an issue you'll get a notification, you pop out the bad drive and put a new one in that will be rebuilt from the good one. You also get a boost in read performance since data can be read from both drives at once. Since the failure of a single drive is proabaly the most common reason people lose data it's going to prevent most losses. It's seamless to the user and doesn't require any action other than normal use.
One thing to keep in mind is this does not prevent corruption of data, e.g. if you are writing your life's story in Word and accidentally delete half of it and save. It also will not prevent issues that can affect both drives, fire, flood or something like cryptolocker.
Beyond that you can use a networked drive or external drive for backup and/or burn a bunch of DVD's/BD discs and ship them to relatives house even if you are only updating them occasionally. Optical media is not a reliable source for backup but something is better than nothing.
Aren't files saved to, say, Google Drive still stored on hard disks?
You can choose to do that if you want. Keep a copy on your hard drive and keep a copy in the Google Drive cloud. That way if your hard drive dies, or if you are just buying a new computer, your files are safe and easily transferable from Google Drive. Or if you want to save hard drive space you can delete the files off your hard drive after uploading them to Google Drive. The only downside is, anything over 15GB you have a to pay a monthly storage fee. That's how most of these services work.
The stupid cloud abstraction is simply a silly name for millions of von Neumann machines networked together.
psik
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