Tech Table Tuesday, August 19, 2014
August 19, 2014
Justin: Welcome to MPA’s Tech Table. I’m Justin.
Diana: And I’m Diana.
Justin: And we’re your hosts. We’ll be serving up a heaping spoonful of all things tech.
Diana: We promise it’ll be easy to digest.
Justin: It’s Tuesday, Diana.
Diana: Yes, I like Tuesdays.
Justin: Yes, you’re doodling on your phone there.
Diana: Well, Tech Tuesday, so I have to use technology.
Justin: Well, there you go, and today we’re going to talk about the cloud.
Diana: Yes. Now, the cloud is a big, white, fluffy bit of mist that’s actually weighs somewhere in the millions of tons.
Justin: Well, that’s not really the cloud we’re talking about here.
Diana: Oh, okay.
Justin: We’re talking about the cloud that is basically a collection of information stored by huge data centers.
Diana: Oh, that cloud!
Justin: That’s accessed over the Internet.
Diana: The tech cloud.
Justin: Yeah. You know, one of the best examples for people who are trying to figure out what the cloud is. You know, things go up through the cloud and then they stay there. You know, how do you get them back from the cloud? Things like that. Well, iTunes is a good example of cloud technology.
Diana: Yes, yes.
Justin: So, storing your iTunes collection on Apple’s iCloud basically means you’re renting space at its data center in Oregon or North Carolina or California, you know, while the status updates on Facebook reside in, strangely, almost exactly those same places, as well as Virginia and soon, Sweden. So, you know, you’re storing those things on their data center and then accessing it over the Internet.
Diana: Yes.
Justin: That’s basically what the cloud is.
Diana: Yes, now have you ever heard of Dropbox, Justin?
Justin: Of course. We use Dropbox a lot for large file sharing.
Diana: Yeah, you can basically store and sync services and files, things like that.
Justin: Right, it’s a store and sync service.
Diana: Service, right. So, its software is installed on 250 million devices, including mine and yours.
Justin: Right, yep, with 50 million users saving approximately 1 billion files every couple of days on its cloud servers.
Diana: That’s insane.
Justin: It is, but that, so all that data is kept encrypted and, you know, on multiple data centers across the United States. You know, because you just can’t keep, these days files are so big and we like our computers to run so fast, you can’t keep all the information what we call locally, which would be on your computer or on your device. You just cannot store it that way.
Diana: Right.
Justin: You know, so now we use clouds and rent storage, basically, for all of our stuff.
Diana: Yes.
Justin: Yeah, that’s basically how you look at it.
Diana: And let’s see, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, they have multiple data across the U.S.
Justin: And you know, you oftentimes see, you know, Google has data centers. They have a couple in Iowa.
Diana: Yes.
Justin: There are many places that have these data centers all over the country. And so, with these data centers, when you store information to a cloud, that’s where it is. It’s actually not up in the sky.
Diana: No, no.
Justin: But it is lurking somewhere in a data center where, you know, tons of information is stored. So, besides iTunes, we use Dropbox. What other services are there.
Diana: Google.
Justin: Well, of course, Google Drive.
Diana: Google Docs, yeah.
Justin: Google Docs, Google Drive, that is all cloud-based. And they say that eventually, most everything that we do will be cloud-based technology.
Diana: Well, you know, when you take photos on your smartphone now, it automatically backs it up to the cloud.
Justin: Right.
Diana: Now, it doesn’t save it there forever, okay?
Justin: Right.
Diana: So, that’s something to be really, really mindful about. If you want to keep your photos or documents or whatever, you know, you want to keep them forever, go ahead and do the old-fashioned way. Save it to your hard drive, save it to a flash drive or something like that, as well.
Justin: Right, yeah. But there are cloud places, you know, you can save it forever if you pay for it.
Diana: If you pay for it, right, but those free things that just automatically happen through your phone and such. That’s not going to be there forever. It’ll be there for a while, but, yeah.
Justin: Right, so that’s a little bit about the cloud and what people mean when they say the cloud. Basically, it’s a data center. Until next time.
Diana: Take care.
Justin: Tech Table is brought to you by MPA of Bloomfield, Iowa, and God’s Country Radio. You can visit us online at AskMPA.com.
Diana: If you have questions or comments, please send them to questions@askmpa.com. That’s questions@askmpa.com.
Justin: And thanks for listening.
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