For better or worse you hear the words “the cloud” these days almost as often as you hear the words “the Kardashians”. In fact, odds are you’ve heard both so many times that you’re not even sure when it all started, if either really matters, or if it’s all just going to go away.
So start by facing the hard facts: Neither is going away any time soon. And while you can certainly debate the merits of the Kardashians’ contribution to society’s greater good, you are far better off arguing the benefits of the cloud.
Yes, the cloud, or cloud computing as it’s properly called, has become a marketing buzzword that unfortunately has little meaning to the average person. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
At iWatchLife we’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about how to make our video monitoring system safer and smarter. We wanted to share our thinking and knew it meant explaining why cloud computing is a good idea for our customers. We also wanted to make sure people understood what using the cloud with iWatchLife meant, which is why we created this white paper.
Now we know that our glorious white paper may not take the New York Times bestsellers list by storm, unless we tell you that J.K. Rowling is the ghost writer. But we didn’t tell you that. Which is why we wanted to use the blog to hit on some of the most basic facts about the cloud and iWatchLife.
To a consumer, the cloud is a server owned by someone else that you can access, save data to, or run programs from over the Internet. This can be an incredibly good thing because it means you don’t have to buy the server to store the data and it means you can retrieve that data from any device that can access the Internet.
The truth is that many people already make use of cloud computing even if they don’t look at it that way. For example, with more than 1 billion people now on Facebook, it means one-seventh of the world’s population has accessed and shared information using cloud computing. If you’re on Facebook writing updates and posting photos and videos, then you’re putting personal information in the cloud, saved to Facebook’s servers.
And since people are using the cloud more and more to store and share personal information, what really needs to be asked is the most obvious of questions: Is my data stored on that server in the cloud—my photos of my kids, my videos, my credit card number, my cell phone number—is it safe?
The answer from anyone being honest is this: For the most part, it should be.
Clearly, the answer everyone wants to hear is yes, always yes. But the truth is that when anyone decides to use the cloud they are taking a calculated risk based on a couple of questions:
Is the company you’re allowing to store your information really trustworthy?
- What level of technology does the company use to protect your information?
- Is the consumer putting information in the cloud that someone would likely want to steal?
- Does the consumer have complete control over the data they’re keeping in the cloud?
And if you want to find out how iWatchLife stacks up when it comes to cloud computing and keeping our members’ information safe, you’re really going to have check out our white paper.
We promise it’s time well spent. That’s a promise the Kardashians can’t make.
