Most people know a cloud as a build up of precipitation in the sky. However, in the computer world the cloud is a relatively old concept that is really just being named and hyped up today. As technology increases, the uses for this computing concept are growing rapidly.
If done well, the cloud can seamlessly integrate to our everyday, personal lives without a hitch. Let’s take a look and see how the cloud is used in our everyday lives.

After you wake up, you have your breakfast and leave to go to work. You get a notification from your work calendar updating the meeting time you had today. After getting to work you forgot to record your favourite show on TV. This is no issue though, you simply go online, log in to your television provider account and then tell it to record the show you want. After doing some work you go on Facebook and view the dinner photos from the night before and you and your friends comment on them and chat online about it. You proceed to go to lunch but have no cash, however after some fast online banking on your phone, you pay with eftpos and make the transaction with your card. While at lunch, you get a text with a link to a funny cat video on YouTube. You view it and the post the link on your blog for others to view and enjoy. After this you…

And it goes on and on after this. We can see about ten distinct instances of something happening online where information is stored ‘somewhere else’ that, without the internet, would not be possible. This external hosting of information is in short what the cloud is, a giant, integrated network making everyone’s lives easier and more connected.

Pros

The cloud is internet based, meaning you can access the information virtually anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. It even allows mobiles to get in on the action with uses such as emails, calendars, social networks etc.
People are able to use different machines and still have access to the same information on them all. Say you work on your Google Docs document at work, you can simply close the window, go home, login there and finish it from where you left off.
Social networking - imagine life without Facebook, Twitter or Google + and imagine not having the instant communication with your friends.
Businesses can reduce costs by not needing their own data centre or staff to maintain the hardware needed. One company is able to run a large data centre and do this work for you.

Cons

There are plenty of upsides, nevertheless there are also downsides. The information you post online is now there presumably for a long time. The internet is an archive, remember. This isn’t always a bad thing, but you don’t want those drunken photos of you when you were a teenager to be on Facebook forever, do you?
Due to the information not being hosted on your own hardware, there is a security risk involved. This opens up the doors for people to hack information, however this is rare due to these large companies having very secure networks to prevent the unauthorised access to your information.
Your dependency on the cloud will run your life. If you suddenly lose internet access and don’t have any of it backed up offline, it’s hard to do anything about it except try to get the internet connection back.
If data is held overseas, it may be subject to different privacy and legal laws. How this impacts someone will change based on the location of the information, but it could be an issue.

Overall, the cloud allows interaction between many people and organisations with great ease, however I think people need to appreciate offline information storage in case their internet connection is ever lost.