Why Cloud Storage Doesn't Work The Way You Might Think

There are a number of misconceptions about cloud storage, which can lead to a number of common cloud storage mistakes. Many people labor under the illusion that cloud storage is more secure than other kinds of storage, which can lead to failing to encrypt files before they're uploaded or uploading files that should never live in the cloud.

A lot of the confusion around cloud storage comes from the language. The concept of a cloud conjures images of decentralized data, leading many to think of it as a kind of distributed storage that lives spread across multiple devices, or as a peer-to-peer storage concept where unused space is shared between users. But this isn't usually the case.

The reality is much simpler, less romantic, and more practical. Cloud storage is just remote storage provided for users by a third party. Think of stacks of hard drives sitting in a data center or warehouse, serving data to a provider's customers over the internet, and you're envisioning a common type of cloud storage.

The concept is less complicated than many users imagine. Simply put, a provider like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Apple iCloud, or Dropbox builds a physical storage infrastructure, made up of servers with processors, memory, and drives housed in data centers, all tied together by high-speed networking and redundancy. That redundancy covers both the data itself as well as power sources, so that neither data corruption nor a power outage should mean the loss of customers' data. Providers then lease that storage to customers, typically for a fee.

In other words, cloud storage does not replace hard drives with some strange new storage concept. It mostly just moves the hard drives somewhere else and adds software that keeps your devices pointed at the latest version of your files.

Cloud storage has a number of advantages. The most obvious is capacity. With the cost of physical storage at a premium, offloading to the cloud is a way to store data without having to clear out a bunch of space. Cloud storage also lets you (theoretically) access your data from anywhere with internet access. It also makes sharing data among multiple users easier, especially in many of the most common storage systems, which have systems in place to allow you to selectively share data without having to hand out your login credentials.