Is Cloud Computing Right For You?

Cloud computing is a hot topic right now but there’s a real lack of clarity surrounding the solution. Before you sign on the dotted line, there are a whole host of business considerations that you need to make. We’ve collated the most important business considerations to help you identify which option makes more business sense.

Cloud: the future of storage is here

Using cloud services for data backup and storage is becoming increasingly common among businesses of all sizes. According to Richard Vester, Director of Cloud Services at EOH, hardware-based storage was long the favoured option because companies looked to protect their data from hacking and loss of privacy. That control is now easily accessible through cloud-based options, which is far more cost-effective.

World personal cloud worth $90 billion by 2020 says Allied Market Research

The personal cloud market will have a compound annual growth rate of 33.1 per cent between now and 2020, by which time it will be worth $89.9 billion globally, according to a new study.

The report, World Personal Cloud Market- Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014-2020, says growing customer awareness of personal cloud services is driving the growth. Europe and the USA will be surpassed by the Asia-Pacific region as the most voracious users of personal cloud apps, with the latter accounting for two-fifths of total market share in 2020.
Advances in smartphones, tablets and mobile devices have boosted the growth of the personal cloud market as storage needs grow, it says. The change was catalysed by the virtualizing of the work environment as employers began using personal cloud storage as a solution to work problems, says the report.

Best cloud storage services 2015/2016 UK

Dropbox is one of the only services to offer clients for Linux and Blackberry, alongside the usual Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS standards. There's an official Windows Phone app too.

The free Basic account comes with a paltry 2GB of storage. For documents this is huge, but if you want to store any kind of media – photos, music, or video - it will disappear very fast. You can upgrade to the 1TB plan for £7.99 per month, but Dropbox offers 500MB of additional free storage for each friend you get to sign up to the service - with a limit of 16GB.

You can gain 1GB more by setting up a Mailbox account and you'll get 250MB just for taking a tour of the Dropbox basics, too. Enabling the camera upload feature will gain you 3GB, and automatically backup your smartphone/tablet photos to the cloud. We've seen deals where you get 50GB of Dropbox space for two years when you buy certain phones and tablets.

Dropbox works by creating a local folder on your device or PC that then syncs with an online version. This means you have all your data available whether you are on or offline. This doesn't apply to mobile devices, though: you can make select files available offline on your tablet or smartphone (they’re all offline by default), and offline editing is among the best we’ve seen.

Folders and files can also be shared with others but you can’t set permissions on the Basic account, so files can be edited (and even deleted) by other users. The Basic account isn't a total disaster, though, as Dropbox backs up any changes to files for 30 days. So if you need an older version or want to undelete a file, it’s still there.

If you pay £7.99 per month to get the Dropbox Pro account, you will be able to enable read-only permissions as well as setting passwords and expirations for shared links.

Read More : http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/internet/14-best-cloud-storage-services-2015-2016-uk-3614269/

How To Stay Safe In The Cloud

Using the cloud is now a fact of our digital lives. Email, blogging, website design and storing digital content all rely on cloud services. The news headlines can seem awash with security scare stories, but with a little effort anyone can use the cloud safely.

All of the cloud-based services that are in use today use passwords and encryption to ensure that the data that moves to and from the cloud servers is secure. The encryption part of the security is invisible to most users.

Make sure your browsing is secure

Just look at the web address in your internet browser. It should begin with ‘https’. The ‘s’ shows that the connection to the cloud is secure. Often your browser will also display a closed padlock indicating that the security protocols to the cloud service you are using are active.

Accessing these services to pick up your email or download some photos you have saved to one of the many cloud storage solutions will mean creating a password. The fundamental way that all users can ensure their use of cloud services are secure is to get into the habit of creating strong passwords. 

Pick a secure password
Believe it or not, 123456 and ‘password’ are still the most common passwords used according to the latest survey from SplashData. QWERTY and abc123 are also commonly used to protect what can often be highly sensitive information stored in the cloud.

The good news is that there are a number of options when it comes to creating strong passwords to protect the data in the cloud:

Read More : http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/11/how-to-stay-safe-in-the-cloud/