Wire Blast

How many of you have been in the following situation: you show up to an important computer presentation, go up to the podium to set it up, and realize that the USB storage drive containing your files has gone missing. Maybe you forgot to bring itmaybe it fell out of your pocket while you were talking to the cute girl at the coffee shop. Either way, you’re now out of luckunless you thought ahead to use cloud storage.The cloud has been in the news frequently over the last couple years. Cloud storage is one of the simplest and most useful benefits that the cloud offers. These applications allow users to store data on a network of virtual servers. It’s somewhat like storing files in your e-mail inbox, except that you usually have a very small amount of space on a single server of your e-mail client. With cloud storage, you can theoretically store an unlimited amount of data on the networked server cloudalthough you may have to pay for the privilege (more on that later).There are three main advantages to the cloud storage model. The first is that companies do not need to purchase physical storage devices for their on-site operations, saving money with IT and hosting. The second is that the company is not responsible for data maintenance, such as backing up or replicating datainstead, the cloud storage provider takes care of these tasks. The third advantage is that companies only pay for the amount of storage they need, since cloud storage is scalable.Two notable examples of cloud storage providers are Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Windows Azure. The Amazon S3 service demonstrates a typical storage pricing model for users in the United States (prices are slightly higher in Northern California):0.140 per GB for the first 1 TB/month0.125 per GB for the next 49 TB/month0.110 per GB for the next 450 TB/month0.095 per GB for the next 500 TB/month0.080 per GB for the next 4000 TB/month0.055 per GB for over 5000 TB/monthUsers can also opt to pay a slightly lower amount for Reduced Redundancy Storage. Data Transfers and other requests include other fees.While Amazon and Windows are trusted companies, you should be careful of storing your data with any company that is unfamiliar and/or seems suspicious. There may also be some performance issues when compared to local storage. However, many people recognize the benefits of transferring the duties of data storage off-site. Will you be one of them?