It’s the 21st century. Businesses are relying more and more heavily on computers to do the brunt of the work for them, and computers are becoming more and more complex. With all of this technology floating around in society today, it’s no wonder that the computer industry has begun to shift away from personal computers and their physical capabilities.
When a business requires a server in order to efficiently do their work, the most common option is for people to pay for a dedicated, or physical, server and then remotely hook all of their other computers up to it. In the past, every time a new employee was added to the system, more software needed to be bought because the existing software license would only allow the company to install the software on a specified number of computers.
Today, however, that particular problem is slowly going away. The solution is a thing known as cloud computing. To explain cloud computing, a server works somewhat like a giant computer. It has an operating system, and you download the software that you need for your company on to it. Then you remotely hook any other computers up to it, and they now all have access to the software that is available on the server.
It also stores all of the data from those computers in one convenient location, eliminating problems caused by limited memory on individual computers. In the past, the more computers your company had, the bigger your server needed to be. It takes a lot of power to make software available to multiple computers, in addition to storing all of the files on them.
With the invention of cloud computing, this problem has been solved. When you are hooked up to a cloud server, you have access to your files from any computer that has internet access, and your files are stored for you on the large bank of computers that make up the cloud server.
There are several advantages as well as a few disadvantages to cloud computing. For example:
- Global access: Having access to your files means that you are no longer tied to a hard drive and a physical server. It means that you can take your work home with you if you want to, instead of being stuck at the office, or you can do your research while on vacation. As long as you have access to the internet, you have access to your files.
- Faster results: Certain problems require a lot of power for the computer to solve. When scientists feed these problems into the computer, it can take several months, or even years, for the computer to come up with the correct results. However, when such information is fed into a cloud server, it has the benefit of many servers doing the same work that one server did previously. The more servers there are working on the problem, the faster the results.
While risks do exist, they are largely security issues that have been anticipated by the company that runs the cloud server. As a result, there is a solution already in place to protect your files. Overall, the benefits of cloud computing are worth the risks because of the results they can produce.
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