The Cloud

• The Cloud is a set of technologies that support distributed storage and distributed processing.
• There are lots of different clouds, and typically they make use of a lot of standard PCs.
• Distributed databases are a simple example of distributed storage.
• Remember that there are a lot of security issues when you put your data in the cloud. (It's not safe there.)
• Of course, there's no reason a company can't use cloud technologies themselves. They do need to keep it off the internet for safety.
• The cloud is more than just storage, you can also do processing on it.
• One obvious benefit is that you can process large data sets.