What is 'The Cloud' and How Does it Pervade Our Lives?

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 07:00:00 GMT
Scientific American - Technology

It governs a lot of your digital life these days, but the story of where it first materialized is...

The cloud is a system of millions of hard drives, computer servers, signal routers and fiber-optic cables.

The cloud is making services more affordable and accessible to people all over the world.

Most cloud computing services also come with optimization tools to handle traffic spikes and lulls, and many have data centers around the world, making sites load faster for international users.

The cloud can also give you access to more computational power than you can easily get on your own, letting you effectively use a supercomputer from your smartphone.

Cloud services generally fall into three categories: software, platforms and infrastructure.

Last, cloud infrastructure provides server space that a customer manages remotely.

While the cloud can make our jobs more efficient and our lives more flexible, we pay for those privileges with our data and security.

Cloud service providers can also collect data from applications built on their servers.

As we connect more of our daily lives to the cloud, we become reliant on a network that controls everything from who we meet on dating apps to whether our credit cards work.

The cloud only exists because of physical parts, such as paper-thin fiber-optic wires that are easily damaged and degrade over time.

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