by Elaine Arthur

Created on: April 04, 2010

"Cloud computing" is a term that wasn't widely used more than a couple of years ago, and today, there are undoubtedly a great many people who still assume it's some kind of exotic and expensive new technology. 

If you count yourself among that group, it will surprise you to learn that you are probably already using it!

Imagine you have created an important document, in Microsoft Word or Excel, for example.  You save it to your computer's hard drive, but with a touch of worry:  Your computer is more than five years old and you've already gotten that "blue screen of death" that warns of the imminent failure of your hard drive and the need to purchase a new computer.  What will happen to your documents if this happens?  They may be unrecoverable.  True, you can back up your system using a variety of methods, but anything that lives in your home (hard drives, discs, tapes, etc.) is vulnerable to theft and destruction.

There's also the problem of portability.  After you complete and save your document, it occurs to you that you may need to have access to it during the day when you're several miles away at work.  You could print it out, of course, and take it with you.  But what if you need to have that document for a community meeting after work, for example?  Suppose you don't have a floppy disk or a CD ... or maybe you need some help with this document and individual disk-drive use simply isn't convenient?

In both of these cases, you may find yourself e-mailing the document to yourself.  As long as you have access outside your home to a computer with Internet capability, you can login to your e-mail program, pull up the message and download the document.  And so, if you are at work and your spouse frantically phones to tell you your house burned down or your computer was carried off by a burglar, you can rest easy, knowing that that important document is still there, in cyberspace, and all you have to do, from any location, is to go online and get it.

That's the basic principle of cloud computing.  What you need "lives" in the internet environment, rather than on a physical drive.

To take this idea a step further, there are now programs specifically designed for cloud computing that will serve the same purpose as e-mailing files to yourself.  Google offers the Documents function, in which you create your files and indicate who you would like to share them with.  This allows for collaboration

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