I Need a Place to Store My Stuff
In one of his comedic sketches, George Carlin talked about the whole point of life was to acquire new stuff. With the acquisition of new possessions, a place to store them becomes necessary, thus bigger houses are purchased to provide more space for storage of our possessions or companies are paid for storage spaces. The same can be said about computer information, as data accumulates storage needs increases. To satisfy that need, larger hard disk drives are bought, flash drives, optical disks or solid state drives are other alternatives. However, in 2007 cloud storage and cloud computing became popular as another way to store and process data (Banerjee, 2011).
What is the Cloud?
“A Cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of inter-connected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resource(s) based on service-level agreements established through negotiation between the service provider and consumers”, (Buyya, 2008). The cloud is also described as a large pool of easily usable and accessible resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or services) that can be dynamically configured to adjusted to variable load (scale), allowing for optimum utilization, which is exploited in a pay-per-use model, (Vaquero, Rodero-Merino, Caceres & Lindner, 2009). While there isn’t a clear and widely agreed upon definition of what the cloud is, both definitions mentioned almost identical as collection of resources, offered to customers on a scalable model where services are provided based on the needs of the customer. One such service is storage on the cloud.
Cloud Storage
In the Information Technology sector today, many companies are required to handle a large amount of data, such as web sales, mobile data or information from social media sites. Such large amounts of data proof costly to store locally as
References: Linda Xu, Miklos Sandorfi and Tanya Loughlin, Cloud Storage for Dummies, 2010 Dan E