Overall the cloud is a great place to securely store data.

Files stored in reliable #cloud services are some of the most secure files you can have, provided you have good passwords. #Google, #Microsoft, and #Amazon all provide reliable cloud services for consumer file storage.

What makes them safe?

• Redundancy:- The service typically stores at least three copies of each piece of data, all in different places. You need to have all three copies disappear at exactly the same moment (e.g. from three separate hard drive failures) to lose that data. After working on Exabyte-scale storage services, I have only seen this happen with a relatively small (e.g. 10^-9) fraction of data. And even that can usually be recovered, it just takes a couple of days.
• Security:- Provided you take care of your credentials (e.g. your password), only you can access those files. They’re sitting on hard drives on machines in remote, physically secure data centers. Your connections to access that data are generally secured so that people can’t eavesdrop on it. The biggest danger is how you secure your local machine.
• Safe sharing:- If you want to give other people read access (or even allow them to write it), you can. No need to make a copy of the file, no need to mail them a thumb drive.

Personally speaking, my home machines have lost hundreds of gigabytes of data (video, audio, and some important stuff) to hard disk failures. I’ve never lost any data I put in cloud services.

There are two provisos:

1. If your password gets cracked, people can access that data if they have your password. Just like they could on your home machine.
2. Viruses can still corrupt local copies of cloud data. If you have your computer set to automatically upload copies to the cloud, then you can overwrite the cloud copies with your corrupt copies. That’s not a problem with the cloud storage, it’s a problem with your machine.

Some #cloud #storage has versioning of files to help you recover from accidental deletes and overwrites.

Overall the cloud is a great place to securely store data.

Social psychologists look at things a little differently than most. Where other scientists break ideas down to the component pieces, a social scientist will look at the relationships between systems. Instead of asking ‘how’ something works, they are more likely to ask ‘why’ something happens. The popularity of cloud storage systems is no exception. It’s easy to compare the components that the major providers may offer, but just knowing storage capacities means little without understanding why someone would use cloud storage systems in the first place. For about $10 per month, a person can get 100 to 200 GB of data storage. What the person does with this data is what makes cloud computing significantly. In a Gatepoint research survey, business executives and IT pros noted some of the benefits of using cloud storage. Having access to data in a disaster was ranked highest (63 percent) by those surveyed, while about half of those surveyed highlighted the benefit of centralizing data management, while 44 percent cited cost savings through the cloud. These benefits are mainly to the enterprise customers of cloud storage services. Though similar benefits are being felt by small businesses and consumers as well.

Communicating with friends

Google is now giving 15 GB of cloud storage for free to be shared across its Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos applications. For those who have purchased certain Google applications, the amount goes up to 30 GB. Unto itself, this announcement is unimpressive. Amazon, Bitcasa, and CX all have free data storage programs. But Google’s cloud storage does not exist in a communications vacuum. The data storage is shared over some of Google’s hottest electronic communication applications. Google+ is Google’s version of a social media platform. Google has been very clever in making their platforms cross-integrated. A person can snap a picture with his Android smartphone, automatically sync the photo into the cloud server, and share it via Google+ and Gmail. All of this can be done with a few clicks of a button. It is this ability to rapidly store and communicate information and photographs that make Google’s cloud system so popular. Google is banking on this by giving users extra storage space for social interactions.

Efficiency in practice

Since efficiency is the goal here, researching the top file-syncing and storage services at HostGator storage reviews may be in order. Checking company needs against the specifics of cloud storage systems are certainly the best way to select a cloud server. Google Drive, SugarSync, and DropBox are file share and syncing systems that allow the user to get into their files from anywhere with Internet access. The syncing mechanism allows the user to edit files within the computer’s resident office suite. Google Drive, formerly Google Docs, has a built-in office suite so that documents can change within the system. #DropBox may be one of the more popular of the cloud storage and syncing providers but PC Magazine gives its nod to SugarSync which they tout as the most intuitive of the file-syncing services.

Music storage

Apple has its own cloud storage specifically for music. iTunes Match has a yearly subscription rate of about $25 and offers a cloud linkage system for music. The service matches existing iTunes songs from the user’s playlist with #iCloud, and only uploads songs that are not already on the cloud. By matching songs with the 26 million already in the cloud, the user does not have to suffer the waiting time necessary for uploading an entire playlist. Once it is on the cloud, the user can play it from any of his Apple devices. Google does have its version of iTunes Match, called (unceremoniously) Google Music. It allows the user to upload 20,000 songs for free or unlimited radio-style music for under $10 per month. While this is technically a cloud storage system, Google Music is not part of the data storage sharing between Google Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos.

Private Clouds

The Internet has made the world smaller. One-third of the world’s population has Internet access. In North America, this number is almost 80 percent. Facebook has more than one billion users. We communicate throughout the world without a thought to location or distance. The Internet has changed the way we think about the world and how we do business. A CA Technologies report shows that 78 percent of U.S. companies store data in a private cloud system. This means that the data is securely accessible to anyone that the user deems appropriate. When Google originally introduced Google Docs, it was not the storage that made it important. It was the interaction across a distance that wowed the users. A person could draft a document in Los Angeles and have it viewed, edited and signed in Hong Kong in a matter of minutes. Before Docs, this was the province of large companies with special optical recognition software that could scan a document for transfer. Now small business owners and entrepreneurs have this technology available. The relationships created because of cloud computing mean that a business’s geographic location no longer needs to be in its backyard.