‘The cloud’ isn’t all that perplexing

Grazed from News-Press.  Author: PR Announcement.

The R-rated comedy “Sex Tape” didn’t quite connect with audiences the way the execs at Sony Pictures hoped it would, but one aspect of the movie did seem to resonate in these technologically confusing times: seemingly no one knows anything about “the cloud.”

In the movie, which made its way to theaters on July 18, a husband (Jason Segel) and wife (Cameron Diaz) use their new iPad to record themselves doing, well, what the title implies. Afterwards, however, Mr. Segel’s character not only forgets to delete the racy video, but accidentally uploads it to “the cloud” where it can be seen by their family, their friends and even the neighborhood mailman…


Ah, the cloud — that nefarious computer entity that takes your digital files, shares them with the world and sends lightning bolts down to earth.

Hijinx ensue as the couple goes on a frantic quest to recover all the iPads they handed out as Christmas gifts. It’s a decent premise, but it also sent many theater-goers home wondering what the chances were that they could get caught in a ‘cloudy’ predicament.

“Slim to none,” says Karim Lahlou, an electronics writer for Consumer Reports. “If you buy an iPad for another person, that doesn’t mean all your pictures, videos and other personal content sync automatically to that iPad. The recipient of your gift would need to sign in with your Apple ID and have iCloud’s My Photo Stream feature turned on for her to see your personal content.”

iCloud and most other cloud storage systems aren’t designed to stream movies — and they require login IDs and passwords — but that didn’t stop the makers of “Sex Tape” from running away with a zany plot and reflecting a slice of society’s perplexed knowledge of the cloud. As Segel’s character says in the trailer: “Nobody understands the cloud! It’s a mystery!”

According to Tyler Steele, a technician at Prolific Technologies in St. Joseph, that mystery has everything to do with the fact that cloud storage isn’t as tangible as computer hardware or even a desktop icon.

“It’s not something they can see and have on their desktop. It’s not something they can control themselves,” Mr. Steele says.

Let’s clear up some of the mystery. Cloud computing means storing and accessing files and programs through the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. It’s that simple. Cloud storage is a great option for people whose computers, tablets or smart phones have little internal memory. Cloud storage programs like Dropbox also make it easier to share images, music files or videos with others.

PCMag.com states that businesses often muck up that simplicity because many of them use the cloud on entirely different levels. Some businesses choose to implement Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where the company subscribes to an application it accesses over the Internet. There’s also Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), in which a business can create its own custom applications for use by all in the company. And, of course, there’s the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), in which digital giants like Amazon and Google provide a backbone that can be “rented out” by other companies. For example, Netflix uses the cloud services at Amazon to provide customers streaming content and other services.

The average laptop or iPhone user, however, will probably never have to work with such complex cloud applications. All they really have to worry about is keeping their login ID and password in a safe place.

“There are more highly advanced applications of the cloud, such as managing vast databases and sequencing genomes, but these are generally used by companies and research institutions — not your everyday sex-tape makers,” Mr. Lahlou says.