Close your eyes and think about where your photos from the last trip are right now. On your phone? Well, not entirely. Your work documents, the music you listen to in the morning and even the series you watch at night actually live somewhere else: in the cloud.
What exactly the cloud is
The cloud, or cloud computing, is the name we give to a set of servers connected to the internet that store and process information for us. When you upload a photo, it is copied onto one of those distant computers, in a data centre, so that you can see it from any device with a connection.
The key is that you do not have to worry about where that server is or about maintaining it. It is like renting an infinite warehouse that costs only what you use. Large companies, from the ones that make your email to the ones that host your games, offer you that space in exchange for a fee or, in many cases, for free in exchange for other services.
A silent revolution
A few decades ago, storing information meant buying hard drives, installing programs and depending on a specific computer. If it broke, you lost almost everything. The cloud changed that rule: now your information is still there even if you lose your phone or laptop.
It also democratised technology. Before, setting up a service for millions of users required investing millions of euros in hardware. Today, any small business can rent cloud capacity and launch its application in days. An idea with a single creator can compete with giants because the server is no longer a problem.
How it works on the inside
Think of the internet as a great highway and servers as the warehouses where the trucks arrive. When you open an application, your device sends a request, that request travels across the network to one of those warehouses, and the server returns the information you see on screen.
To make sure nothing goes down, companies duplicate their data in several places at once. If one of the technical centres fails, another takes over automatically. That is why many times you do not even notice the problems behind it: the network is designed so that there is always a copy available.
Three ways to use it
Not all cloud is used the same way. In the public cloud, the server belongs to a company and many organisations share its capacity, like renting a flat in a big building. In the private cloud, by contrast, the infrastructure is for one organisation alone, like buying a house.
And in between is the hybrid one, the most common today: it combines the company’s own with what is rented as appropriate. A bank, for example, keeps the most sensitive data on its private server but uses the public cloud for less delicate tasks. That way a balance is achieved between security and cost.
The shadows of the cloud
Trusting everything to third parties also has risks. The main one is privacy: if your data lives on a third-party server, that company has access to it. In addition, when there is no internet connection, the cloud disappears: without a network, there is no access to your files.
And there is a cost almost nobody mentions: the energy one. Data centres consume enormous amounts of electricity, both to run and to cool down. That is why large companies are investing more and more in renewable sources to power these facilities.
The future is already here
The cloud is the foundation on which almost all current technologies are built: artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, video calls, remote work. Without it, none of that would exist as we know it.
We will use the cloud more and more for more things, without even realising it. The phone, the TV, the car and even the household appliance will be connected to those distant warehouses. The cloud is not the future: it is already the present that underpins almost our entire digital life.
