Clouds are used a lot. It is often more clever and practical to be able to access your data from anywhere. That’s why cloud services are becoming more and more relevant and are indispensable these days. However, there are also certain disadvantages that can occur when using clouds.

Pros and cons

When data can be downloaded independently of location and device using an Internet connection, this is referred to as the cloud computing model. In this model, computing resources are offered as a service, which can then be used for servers, data storage or applications. The term cloud comes from the fact that the computer resources used are not physically on site, but can only be accessed via an Internet connection and are therefore not “tangible”, more or less like a cloud.

But what are the advantages of such a cloud service?

With the help of a cloud, you can access your data from anywhere. Since the data does not reside on your own system, clouds offer advanced data protection. With access permissions, other people can also access the memory very easily. In addition, cloud services offer theoretically unlimited storage space.

But are there also disadvantages?

Since the data is not stored on the user’s own system, an Internet connection is mandatory. Moreover, you entrust your own data to an external provider, where the storage location is largely unknown. In addition, there is an increased risk that unauthorized persons can access the data, since it is now no longer stored internally but on external servers.

Security in Clouds?

Technically, all clouds are secure. Data communication between the local computer and the cloud service is encrypted so that third parties cannot easily intercept the traffic. In addition, access to a cloud is password protected. There are now very many providers that offer cloud services. A good overview of the security of various clouds such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon Drive can be found here.

What happens in the event of a failure?

The worst thing that can happen with a cloud is a failure. Because then the service is no longer accessible and thus it loses its complete usefulness and that has massive consequences. Especially when it is a large provider and many use this service, you notice the extent even more. Just this week, there was an outage of some Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud servers. This resulted in slow loading or complete outages for large parts of the Internet. For example, various streaming services such as Disney Plus or Netflix were briefly unavailable, as were various games (e.g. League of Legends or Valorant). In addition, there were also outages of Amazon products such as the assistant Alexa or the eBook service Kindle.

So you can see that clouds have many pros and cons, and that there can be significant repercussions in the event of a failure.