Mini how to: 1. No, really, what IS the cloud?
Was having a conversation at a party last week about this (yeahman, you just know the kind of happenings I go to) and someone asked me this, citing that dreary Microsoft advert where some insanely dull person says 'let's take it to the cloud'. Whizzy stuff then happens and you are left no wiser.
Very simply put: cloud services are things you only ever have online and the 'cloud' is just a confusing way of referring to stuff 'out there' on the Internet. They aren't dependent on your particular computer, they can be accessed from anywhere.Paypal is a cloud service: you don't have a Paypal installed on your computer. Hotmail is a cloud service. Google documents is a very useful cloud service: like a word document or spreadsheet that lots of people can work on at once (and see each other's changes as they make them). Those are all cloud services and you probably use them every day.