You hear a lot about ‘the cloud’, but how does it actually work?
The term ‘cloud’ implies something that’s above your head, but in reality the data that you upload is likely to be stored very much at ground level or even underground, and probably thousands of miles away from your location. A cloud service is actually a cluster of computers: more accurately, a huge number of servers with vast amounts of hard drive storage attached. It’s a natural evolution of the technology behind the internet itself and has come about largely thanks to rapid improvements in global bandwidth and the plummeting price of storage capacity.
The internet is actually just a collection of data centres – albeit many thousands – all connected through various global hubs and thousands of miles of heavy-duty undersea cabling. As the web grew and companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon came to use it more and more for services, sales and software delivery, it became necessary to build large server farms and data centres to cope with the sheer volume of visitors and information they had to store and serve to users. Companies like Akamai grew correspondingly, providing heavyweight video streaming and content delivery for other big tech companies. Bandwidth isn’t free, and big telecoms firms round the world own the physical infrastructure and charge your ISP for it.
The idea that ordinary users could use cloud storage began to take off as home broadband started to become widely available. Companies would offer online file storage, but for a long time capacities were low and prices high. Apple’s own early forays into the world of cloud storage were not entirely blemish-free, with iTools and later .Mac and MobileMe failing to live up to the company’s reputation for ease of use. With iCloud, that early vision has been much more fully realised.
At the same time many other developers (Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Box, to name just a few) built their own cloud syncing and sharing services that usually work across Macs, PCs, iOS devices and often Android. Though Apple and Microsoft have an interest in making their cloud services integrate specifically with their own operating systems and hardware, third party developers want to be on all the big platforms, which is great news for users because it means you can often access stuff from your different devices.
When you upload or sync a file or a folder to the cloud, it is literally being copied digitally to your allocated space on a server somewhere on the planet. The fact it takes mere seconds to upload or download belies the vast distance that the data may be travelling. Cloud storage works like a connected hard drive, except that rather than plugging in over USB, it’s remote and linked over the internet. The same applies to mobile devices too, and it’s these that have helped to drive the growth of cloud services. Getting files from your computer to your phone or iPad can be a hassle, but with all your devices signed into the cloud you can use the virtual drive as a central storage location.
You can share things from the cloud, too. Need to send a 500MB movie file? Stick it in the cloud, password protect it (if you like) and send out the link. Since it’s remote, your data is fairly well protected – certainly from hardware failure or theft – and you can be sure that these companies have lots of backup tech in place.
Most cloud services now go beyond simple online file storage and now offer file syncing too, which means uploading batches of data at once, and analysing which files have changed since the last sync. You can manage different versions of files and use ‘watch folders’ in many cases to have anything you store in a local folder automatically uploaded.
The advantages of cloud syncing are obvious, especially when it’s baked into the operating system like in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. Even when it’s an add-on service like Google Drive or Dropbox that you access through a browser or an app, the fiendishly complex technology that enables it all to work is hidden from the user. After a few false starts, cloud syncing technology is more approachable and powerful than it’s ever been, even if you’re not an expert on what’s going on behind the scenes.
When you upload to the cloud you entrust your data to someone else; and some pictures have been ‘stolen’ from online accounts. In truth this is believed not to have been a hack as much as a ‘phishing’ attack (guessing someone’s password rather than defeating any digital locks). You should use complex passwords and Apple’s two-factor authentication to greatly reduce any risks. There’s also a potential issue if your connection has a usage cap; if you’re on a mobile device it can be wise to limit data uploading over cellular so you don’t burn through your monthly data allowance.
It can be hard to pick what service to use – though there’s nothing stopping you mixing different ones – so let’s examine the big cloud service providers.