What IS "The Cloud" anyway?

"The Cloud" is an overloaded term. In tech-speak, "overloaded" means that people use the same term to mean different things.

Computer geeks like to connect computers to each other and make them talk to each other in electronic ones and zeros, making a computer "network". 

Some computers on the network might have special jobs, like listening for incoming email messages or accepting requests to download any new messages. A file server is a place to copy files to or from. 

A web server is just a file server that listens for requests, usually from anywhere and in a certain protocol. Those files are in a particular format, like hypertext markup language (HTML), and often have references to other files also on the web server, like images and videos.

You might have special devices on your network, like security cameras, web TVs, or wi-fi access radios. Somewhere, your network has a box that is also connected to the Internet, your Internet "router".

A router is a very small computer with at least two network connections, one to your local area network (LAN) or wireless network (Wi-Fi), and one to another network, usually off-site. That off-site network, usually called a "wide area network" (WAN), speaks a different protocol than the LAN because the other end of the WAN connection is usually further away, so the protocol must allow for time delays between messages ("packets"). That router knows how to pass messages from your LAN to your WAN and back again, sending ("routing") them to the correct computer on your LAN. 

And if your router's WAN connects to your neighbor's router, and to their neighbor's router, usually through an internet service provider (ISP), you and your neighbors have created an interconnected network of networks, an "internet."

"Why," you ask, "would I want to connect to my neighbor's home network?"

(Your "neighbor" might be a restaurant down the street or an auto repair shop in the next town. In the "good old days" of the internet, those neighbors might have a web server on the premises. These days, they pay Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or GoDaddy to host their website on a "virtual" server, which is still just someone else's computer. But I digress.)

Your ISP, usually your cable provider or phone company, wants to help you connect to your neighbors' networks. And your ISP connects to other ISPs. Those ISPs connected to long-distance ISPs ("trunk providers") that use ever faster and fatter cables ("pipes" or "tubes" in network jargon) to connect all of the ISPs together, so your network can talk to Google's, Amazon's, and Yahoo's networks.

Imagine that entire network diagram, with millions of computers: laptops, file servers, mail servers, web servers, tablets, cell phones, Wi-Fi radios, routers, security cameras, etc., all on one, single page. That page would be huge, measured in square miles, and the writing would be very small.

And you wouldn't care about what's on it.

You care about your local network: your printer, your game box, your web TV, your laptop, your file server; just your devices. Your router connects your devices to the rest of the world's computers over the Internet using these magic "protocols". You don't care about the details of the rest of the network diagram. So, to simplify the diagram, let's replace all of the networks you don't care about with a single icon: a cloud, an amorphous blob of "out there".

The Cloud is just how techies wave their hands and refer to the rest of the computer world, the great "out there."

But any companies who want you to use their service that lives "out there" might want to tell you where, for instance, they are keeping your email, your files, or your web pages. "They're, uh, in 'The Cloud.' Out there."

In other words, you probably don't need to know about it. And you probably don't care. You trust your Cloud service provider to put it all where you can find it and protect it from unauthorized users. You do trust them, don't you?

That's part of their value proposition. "Let us keep that for you. You don't need to worry about where. We'll protect it for you. Trust us."

And THAT is probably the biggest question: the elephant in the room.

How much do you trust your cloud service provider?