Top 10 Small Business IT Questions

#1 What is the Cloud?

The name Cloud sounds mysterious and difficult to grasp. It really isn’t. In its simplest form anything outside of your physical location, i.e. your house or office, is the Cloud. The way most of us access things outside of our physical location is through the public information highway known as the Internet. The Cloud has become synonymous with the Internet.

If you travel back in time when the dinosaurs walked the earth (25+ years ago) before the Internet, everything was self-contained in your office. The software, hardware and data you needed to perform your daily duties were all located in one location – usually on a PC or server sitting under a desk. If you were connected to another office location, your company owned and managed the connection of these “self-contained” locations. Today our world is ubiquitous because of the Internet. Not only are you connecting to other offices through the Internet but you are also accessing software and hardware through the Internet. You can even store your data on the Internet.

The Cloud, then, is all that stuff outside of your current physical location or, if you’re a dinosaur like me, outside of your cave!