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What is the cloud?

It's the place where many people and companies store data.

ATLANTA — Amazon’s recent issues that briefly impacted deliveries and even the way people watch television have many wondering exactly what happens when data is sent to the cloud.

An outage at Amazon Web Services impacted everything from airline reservations to the publishing system for the Associated Press. Amazon’s video streaming service was also disrupted when Amazon’s cloud computer service went down for several hours.

Most people use the cloud to store pictures and important documents in a safe place just in case a computer's hard drive should crash. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google maintain cloud servers that store and protect data.

Cybersecurity expert Dr. Andy Green of Kennesaw State University said businesses turn to the cloud to store information they need so they don’t have to spend money on their own servers.

“You don't need to have experts who know how to stand this stuff up,” Green said. “We (cloud services) do it for you. Oh, and by the way, we build these protections in so that your systems are safer than they would otherwise be.”

If someone uses Google, for example, to access and edit documents on any computer or device, they're using the cloud.

Green said people have to trust the company running the cloud servers to protect whatever has been stored there.

“And they publicly talk about the steps that go through to protect their customer's data,” Green said. “What they're doing is really selling their reputation. They are they're convincing the public that, yes, we're keeping your data safe.”

Green said the best thing people can do is to keep their data with more than one cloud service.

“I can copy all these files to multiple locations simultaneously,” Green said. “That way, this provider can go down. I still got it locally, and I've still got it backed up completely into other locations.”

Technology research company Gartner projects companies that run the cloud will make about $332 billion dollars this year, a 23% increase over last year.

 

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