Cloud | The Computer Potato

Are you looking for a safe and easy backup solution for your work files, or just looking to store some of your confidential and unlosable files somewhere? The Cloud is the solution (Read more here about Cloud). And almost everywhere you look there are many solutions from Apple, Dopbox and less popular companies. However, you might already have a large Cloud space to store your files for free if you have a Gmail or Hotmail account.

Google and Microsoft the owners of Gmail and Hotmail respectively have graced there loyal users with 15GB of online storage (aka Cloud) linked to their accounts.

There are apps for your phone, programs for your PC or just login to access your files from a web browser. Google called its Google drive and Microsoft, Onedrive. You can search your App market to find them. Microsoft has also added a bonus for people that have it on their mobile devices and have auto photos backup turned on, by doubling the size which gives you 30GB.

What is best about this type of storage is you can easily access your files anywhere in the world and share it with whomever you might decide to.

To give you an idea of how much data the online drives can hold see below a break down of common files

If you have the camera set to normal capture like we normal folks, the 15GB can store 9000 or more.

A 22 page Word document is 64kb on the new Microsoft Word 2010. The 15GB drive can store almost 2,500,000 of these files

A song can be 6mb on almost best quality. With the 15GB you can store almost 2500 of your favourite songs

Video files are always larger and the size depends on the length of the video. But the 15GB can store a lot of it, having in mind your phone without additional memory is usually 16GB

Conclusion: Even though you will need to sign up for a Gmail or Hotmail account to use these drives, we can’t help but think this is a handy and cheap way of saving some of your most usable files, photos or video.

You recall my article about the Cloud. Also I have simply explained what Virtual Desktops can do for businesses. Cloud based VD (Virtual Desktops) can even offer faster recovery, faster access and more secure infrastructures. Cloud based virtualisation was mostly for computer servers in the past as businesses thought it was best. But we all know without the people working on the office floor, there would be virtually no business to run. This can translate to computers on the office floor (the desktops), without them the servers virtually have nothing to do. Some application of this technology would be;

Small businesses given the ability to create, add, remove, manage and secure desktops in faster ways than we could. Not only is this faster to deploy now, the same hardware can be reused for upgrades when they do occur without much extra cost

Home workers can easily connect to their desktops anywhere in the world and work seamlessly without no additional costs involved. Any device can also be used to access the desktops, this gives the business a wide range of workers with different parts of the world working securely.

Disaster recovery is a big part of businesses now as more and more companies cannot afford to lose working hours in this fast paced world. Cloud based virtualisation offer a very robust method of easily backing up desktops that can be implemented again with low cost.

Conclusion: It would seem like the key word for advertising cloud based virtualisation is lower cost. The benefits actually go beyond that for a company ready to roll out this fairly new technology to its workers. This article has tried to outline the major strengths and selling points for the cloud VDs which includes but not limited to faster deployment, easier management, flexible desktop roll outs and efficient disaster recovery system.

What do you think? Please tell us below.

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