Cloud Computing – Best Cloud Storage Services
More and more businesses are moving from the traditional local storage on a hard drive on just one device and opting for cloud computing and cloud storage services. There are plenty of things to consider when choosing a cloud service:
Advantages of Moving Your Data to the Cloud
1. Accessibility – This is perhaps the biggest advantage of any cloud service. You no longer have to rely on just one computer hard drive having all of your files. Nowadays, most people are essentially connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, whether it’s on their work computer, their iPhone or their tablet computer at home. Moving your storage and data to the cloud means you can access and update your data from anywhere on any device at any time.
2. Reliability – If your computer crashes and you lose all of your important documents, then you might just be screwed. However, using a cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Documents means that you are relying on these companies’ millions of servers not to crash on you. They probably won’t because they have invested millions of dollars to ensure that doesn’t happen.
3. Cost - Stop worrying about paying for the latest versions of Microsoft Office every year for all of your employees. More and more companies are moving from Microsoft Outlook to GMail to handle all of their corporate emails, and eventually Google will take over Microsoft Word and Excel.
4. Multiple users - It’s extremely easy to share your data and files through the cloud versus requiring users to be logged into your LAN or company intranet or remotely connecting through a VPN
Disadvantages of using cloud services
1. Privacy – This is probably the biggest disadvantage. When you use a service like GMail or Dropbox, you are hosting your data on other company’s servers. Most of these cloud computing companies have good privacy policies in place to prevent them from accessing your data, but there’s always the risk that a rogue employee could steal all of your data.
2. Security – This is similar to the point I made above, but security is a big problem. Hackers routinely break into online systems all of the time so if a hacker compromises your GMail or Dropbox account, then that’s not good. If you have proprietary data that you don’t want anybody to have access to, you’re better off storing your files remotely.
Best Cloud Storage Services
1. Dropbox.com- Dropbox is awesome because it integrates with your computer file system, meaning you can drag and drop files into your Dropbox account just like you would drop a file into a different directory on your Windows system. It also offers free accounts so I encourage you to check it out.
2. Box.net – Box.net is similar to Dropbox so I encourage you to check it out.
3. Amazon Simple Storage
Best Cloud Computing Sites
Google Documents – Including GMail for email, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, and so on. There’s really going to be no need to use Microsoft Office once Google gets its Word and Excel-killers up to speed.