Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud.

While the rain-bearing variety has been in short supply here up until lately, a very different type of cloud thrums away out of sight.

It doesn’t keep crops green or reduce our risk of fires, but it does enable us to operate businesses in a modern world and store the photos and documents we couldn’t imagine losing.

Is it a bird?

Is it a plane?

No, it’s the cloud!

Chances are you’ve been using the cloud without even knowing it. If you’ve ever used Facebook or Gmail, congratulations - those are both incredibly famous examples of applications hosted in the cloud!

The cloud, in very basic terms, is simply a place to store things or perform tasks via an internet connection between your device and itself.

Nothing scary, nothing super technical, just a computer somewhere other than the one currently on your lap.

It’s not difficult to sell the advantages of being able to access applications and files from anywhere with an internet connection.

Especially given the recent huge shift in the way we work. While the ability to work from home has been with us for years, a move to the cloud makes it accessible to a much larger group of organizations who aren’t now bound by costly hardware and lack of knowledge for the technical aspect.

Microsoft’s OneDrive and Google Apps for Business are so easy to set up and maintain now, almost anyone could do it.

Given a reliable internet connection, there are also cost benefits too. Using an example which we can all relate to: storing photos taken on our (now fantastic quality) smartphones. There is around a two hundred dollar difference between the smallest and largest iPhone storage options, a significant percentage of the total purchase cost of the device.

Storing everything on Apple’s iCloud service however can cost as little as a dollar a month. Happen to be an Amazon Prime member? You’re already paying for unlimited photo storage on their cloud!

So why isn’t everything cloud based, nowadays? Well, while it’s certainly trending in that direction there are drawbacks to deploying things in this manner.

Chiefly and most obviously is the total reliance on your internet connection. Without that link between your eyeballs and your stuff stored on a server farm in Seattle, you’re out of luck.

Some applications combat this by keeping a small local store of your most frequently used items, or low resolution copies of your favorite photos, but it’s not ideal.

For businesses it’s less of an issue, as there are hybridized solutions which retain the benefits of the cloud while keeping a local copy of your data for periods of no internet connectivity, but they’re generally too costly to justify for us normal folk.

I’m not one for spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. There is however a conversation to be had regarding the security of your data when choosing a cloud service.

Yes, data breaches do happen and details do occasionally get leaked. But the fix for this typically is just as simple as changing your password for the affected service.

The home network your computer or phone resides on is likely much less secure than any cloud service.

Security is at the absolute forefront of the design of these systems as nobody wants to be the next headline, so you can rest assured that your holiday photos are safe from prying eyes.

Maybe the beach this year?

You did just save a couple of hundred bucks on that new iPhone.

Richard Noble is the founder of Want For Tech, an IT company based in Glasgow.