Cloud in practice
When a program is said to be “in the cloud”, it means it does not run on your computer but on servers in a data centre, reachable over the internet. You access it from a browser or an app; the provider takes care of maintaining the machines, the power and the connection.
For a business it means working from any place and any device, without a server in the cupboard to keep running and updated. Resources can be increased as users and data grow, and a broken office PC loses nothing, because the data is not stored there.
A web app for managing orders, company email, a shared document archive: these are all examples of the cloud. A nightly backup to external storage, as in our cloud backup example, is another typical use: if something happens at the office, a copy of the data is safe elsewhere.
Cloud does not automatically mean safe. Ask which country the data is stored in, because for personal information this also matters under the GDPR; turn on two-step verification; check who has administrator rights. And keep independent copies anyway: a file deleted by mistake in the cloud is gone there too, unless you have a separate copy.
