The many and much-touted benefits of cloud are, by now, well known. A well implemented cloud infrastructure can help reduce costs for your business, add scalability to your future plans, and bring efficiencies that can reduce project times and increase agility.
Of course, probably the most commonly cited benefits is the ability to back up your data and information offsite, storing it remotely in servers owned by cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud. It is the simplicity and accessibility of this feature in particular that has helped propel cloud storage as back up tool into the consumer space.
One estimatefrom 2013 puts the total amount of data stored in the cloud at 1 exabyte, or 1024 petabytes or 1,073,741,824 gigabytes of data. This figure is likely to be much higher as of today. And yet, despite this almost universal acclaim by individuals and businesses alike for the many benefits of cloud, it seems that the message still hasn’t quite reached everyone.
Earlier this year, it was reported that a man risked his life to rescue a book from a burning building. The aspiring author hadn’t backed up the novel he was working on, preferring instead to work from a local copy stored on his laptop. When his home caught fire and he realised that his work would be lost, he risked his life to re-enter the building to rescue it. Luckily he emerged unscathed, but a dangerous situation could have been avoided by simply backing up his work in the cloud.
The story bears some of the hallmarks of the
infamous incident where Toy Story 2 was almost deleted, leaving Pixar’s future hanging in the balance. The film was around a year out from release, and had a significant amount of man hours already behind it.
However, after someone entered the '/bin/rm -r -f *' command into the company’s drives (hopefully mistakenly, although that still remains a mystery), executives watched in real-time as 90% of the movie disappeared from servers in a matter of seconds. To make matters worse, the backup system had failed. Salvation only came in the form of a supervising director who had a recent copy of the film at home to work on during her maternity leave.
What these admittedly rather extreme examples demonstrate is very real examples of where proper cloud computing can make real impacts in both business and social life. It could not only save you time, money, space, and inefficiencies, it could also save your life.
It cannot, sadly, save your rack of ribs
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