The Internet Cloud and You

1. What is ‘the cloud’?

"Cloud computing" describes when a personal computer relies on distant servers – themselves powerful computers and known collectively as "the cloud" – for certain tasks and services, often in one of two ways.

The first: data storage. When you post a photo to Facebook, the company’s servers hold on to that image. This lets you share the picture with friends, view it from any of your electronic devices, and even delete the photo from your PC without fear of losing it forever. The image lives in the cloud now.

The second common use is more forward-looking. Those yonder servers can help your computer or phone do things that it is not powerful enough to tackle on its own. For example, iPhones and Android smart phones offer a free app called Google Translate. Speak into the phone – "Excuse me, where’s the nearest bathroom?" – and within seconds the app will translate your sentence into any of 58 languages. Modern phones don’t have processors powerful enough to translate your voice quickly and accurately. Instead, the app turns your request into a sound file, sends it up to the cloud, and lets Google’s supercomputers do the heavy lifting.

Because of this dependence on far-off servers, Google Translate and other cloud services only work when you have an Internet connection. 

2. How is this different from the regular Internet?

The cloud is really just a different way of using the Internet. Both terms are used rather liberally, says Mark Weiner, senior vice president of marketing at Virtela, which manages companies’ computer networks, in part through cloud services.

" ‘The Internet’ is a really fuzzy term, as the same word describes both the content and network," says Mr. Weiner. He prefers to use the word "Internet" only when talking about the network, or the connections between computers.

Websites, e-mail, and everything else you do in a browser fall under a different category, "the Web." But that’s only about 15 percent of Internet traffic. The majority lies in various cloud services (particularly Internet video) and peer-to-peer file sharing.

These terms get a little fuzzier when websites tap into the cloud. For example, Gmail and Hotmail keep in-boxes in the cloud so that people can access their e-mail from any browser they like. 

3. Does new technology make the cloud possible?

The idea of the cloud dates back to the early days of computing, when university supercomputers shared their processing power with lots of dummy terminals. Weiner says he first heard the new term in 2005, when speedy Internet connections, ever-improving server specs, and years of software development gave this old model a second life.

Getting hundreds or thousands of Google servers to efficiently divide and share the labor has played a huge part in the company’s success. The search engine giant could probably offer translation software for smart phones that doesn’t require an Internet connection, says Josh Estelle, a senior software engineer on the Google Translate team. But by relying on servers, the smart phone app takes up only 3.2 megabytes (equivalent to a single song file), rather than clogging up a phone’s relatively tiny storage with "billions if not trillions" of translation data points, he says.

And as wireless Internet connections get faster, so will many cloud services. "On average, the speed of your phone’s connection to the Internet" is more important "than the time spent on our servers," he says. "Our servers can translate sentences in a few hundredths of a second."

4. Should we be welcoming or wary of the cloud?

Both. By storing more of your data in the cloud, you’re allowing companies to know much more about you. Gmail, for example, which offers its e-mail service free of charge, tucks advertising into the right column of each electronic letter. Google tries to make these ads relevant to your interests by selecting subjects that match the contents of your e-mail. Mention a wedding, and Google might show ads for caterers, photographers, and honeymoon travel deals.

This is just some of what companies theoretically could learn about you through the data you send them. Weigh the privacy concerns for yourself. 

5. What’s next?

In the next few years, hardware specs could mean very little. Why buy a $2,000 PC when a fast Internet connection to the cloud could provide all the processing power and data storage that a family could need?

Already, companies such as Carbonite back up people’s entire hard drives online. Now Apple and Amazon are rolling out services that let families store huge libraries of movies and music – far larger than could fit on any phone or tablet – and pull individual files down from the cloud when needed.

Another company, OnLive, saves gamers from buying expensive computer hardware by running processor-hungry video games on its servers, and then sends a video feed of those games to lower-end PCs. A player’s controls go up to the cloud; video of the outcome seamlessly comes back down.

If such services take off, people could enjoy much cheaper computer prices – yet with a lot more monthly fees. Buying a new PC might feel more like picking cable packages.

Of course, phone companies and other Internet service providers are already imposing limits on how much data you can download each month, a policy that threatens to quash the whole idea, especially for mobile devices.