5 ways you use the cloud all the time without even realizing

27.06.2018 2,383 17

Martin Deshev

Over the past few years, “cloud” began to mean a lot more than the fluffy (and sometimes quite angry) features in the sky. These days in the world of IT, the “cloud cover” is pretty much constant. Yet, this doesn’t mean bad weather. In fact, it’s the opposite. In IT, the cloud actually brings bright weather.

Often people don’t fully realize just how prevalent the cloud really is. It’s still viewed mostly as an enterprise service, which companies can use but few understand. In fact, the cloud is a lot more and has evolved over the past few years. Today, we use at least one service based on or powered by the cloud on a daily basis. And in many cases, we use much more than that. Here are five ways we all use the cloud every day.

Email

Few people actually have their own email server and rely on services like Gmail, for example. Generally, companies do have their own email servers and keep their data on their own premises. As Gartner pointed out a while back, though, cloud email is rapidly picking up in enterprise as well. Many corporations are now moving their entire email infrastructure to the cloud, which makes it easier to maintain and operate, while it is often much more secure.

Social media

People spend a lot of time on social media. We all share photos, videos, even files and other notes. Often, we even keep our only copies of those items entirely in the social media profiles. They are easily accessible from every place and device. This makes social media similar to a basic cloud service for storage. And it actually hosts a large quantity of personal data, which comes with a lot of responsibilities for those services.

Remote documents, collaborations

These days, the workforce is more free and mobile than ever. You can get a lot of work done right on your smartphone, while sitting in the park. Before that, we needed computers for even minor tasks. Some people, for instance, write entire articles on their phones (not this one, though). This has made the use of remote documents and other collaboration services very common. For them to work, companies rely on the cloud to make sure everyone in the loop stay fully synced at all times. So, thank you, cloud, for making our work better and easier!

Messengers, apps

Nowadays, messengers and all kinds of other apps are very common. In many cases, these apps actually rely on the cloud. They use it to store, analyze, process data, and even base their security in the cloud. All of that is the main reason why apps can do so much while working effectively on various devices with different configurations.

Analytics, AI and other new tech

The cloud is not only about storage, synchronization or collaboration. It can offer a lot more such as shared resources, virtualization, etc. By using the cloud, companies can get access to enhanced analytics, security and new technologies. Things like machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), etc. are available via the cloud without the need to build complex infrastructure to run or use them.

So it turns out that we see and use all of those special tracking add-ons and AI personalized services on a daily basis?
Yes, they are powered by the cloud, which keeps everything connected and working.