With Google’s Drive, Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft’s OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), and Ubuntu’s One, all the big powerhouses in technology have moved to offer some services of a cloud of networks. Although there has been significant talks about the cloud in our daily lives, most of are quite oblivious to what the Cloud really does and where it can comes into use.
Cloud Networking is a recent development where individuals or business powerhouse can use the Internet and provide services to communicate, transfer files across each other, without any form of localized networking, and move it all to an international server which, in turn, is locally accessed by a different computer.
To put it more simply, we have all been used to transferring files via the Wi-Fi or the local network. For example, if you go on to any kind of a business environment, there is usually a server that all computers within the confines of the office can access. This server can be a space for people within an organization to share important files. Let’s say, as a journalist, you write an article and need to provide your piece of writing to the designer. Normally, this is done with the use of additional hardware, like a pen-drive or an optical drive. But using a different hardware is rarely done in a business environment. So, we use servers that can be accessed all across the business house, which makes file sharing a lot of easier.
But what Cloud Networking brings to light is the opportunity to negate the hassle of starting up a new server. It provides you with a service that stores all of your files together in one online space that can be accessed by many different people, just like a server on the Internet.
One of the most famous cloud services that many of us use but are unaware of is Dropbox. Dropbox is also a cloud service but seems to be targeted more at individual users. Using it is a lot easier as well because of the cross platform support and the ease of use. Not only Dropbox but almost all of these cloud-based services have local applications for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, making file sharing between devices a breeze.
These applications, once installed in your computer, will automatically create a Dropbox or OneDrive folder in your system where every file you drop automatically reaches the web server. You can access these files on your cellphone or tablet with the help of an iOS or Android application which gives you access to your files. So any files you drop on your cloud folder is instantly available in all your other devices, and even if you happen to use your friend’s computer and you need access to your files, a web portal for your files are also available.
Google is pioneering the cloud movement with the help of their Chromebook, a laptop that runs on Google’s own Chrome OS but works entirely on the web. Your music, your documents and even your applications work entirely from the cloud and all the documents that you create are saved in your cloud drive.
Google has been offering many forms of cloud services for a long time, like Google Docs or Google Music. Google Docs has been offering an online word processor that rivals Microsoft’s much appreciated Office for a long time and we have even been uploading documents or presentations on Google Docs for ages. We’ve used Gmail as a tool for sending across files to friends and family, but the Cloud’s creating, editing and sharing documents have never been easier.
Microsoft, with the release of the Office Web Apps, is in a way trying to shift the traditional norm of having office installed in a working PC. With Office Web Apps, the entire word processor experience that you get with an installed version of Office, is now available on the Internet for use. Office Web Apps are limited in certain functionalities but other free alternatives, like Google Doc, are equally powerful to their computer counterparts. In the newest installment of Microsoft’s Office 2013 series, the program is also programmed for save on the SkyDrive folder by default.
Similar to Microsoft’s push to embed cloud services on Windows itself, Apple has already made the jump with Mac’s native support for iCloud. Android users are also automatically signed up for Google’s Drive services since an Android phone automatically syncs all of your contacts, photos and call logs to your Google account and retrieves them back for your phone.
Google also offers an amazing cloud service that uploads all of your music to cloud storage called Google Music. The Google Music application, once installed in your system, automatically starts scanning for your music files and one by one starts uploading them to your music server on the cloud. Paired up with the Android app for Google Music, you have access to your entire music collection on the fly. But Google Music does require an active Internet connection to download your music for the server.
The future of networking technology seems to heavily dominated by cloud networking, especially once the Internet becomes cheaper and commonplace in Nepal. Seamless integration with multiple devices, the security of never losing your documents, and the easy access says it all for the future of cloud networking.
But Nepal still has a lot of high speed Internet troubles and the complete implementation of cloud services maybe a thing of the distant future; but no matter, a change is still coming.
