Which Access Control Techniques Can Scale To A Cloud Computing Environmen

What Is the Cloud?

Virtually everybody engages in "cloud calculating," but a recent survey revealed that almost people haven't the faintest idea what it is.

Some 29 percent of Americans call up "the cloud" — the thing you access when you lot deject-compute — is an actual cloud, the sky or something else related to the weather, co-ordinate to a nationally representative survey of ane,006 American adults conducted past Wakefield Research.

Other survey respondents defined the cloud as: toilet paper, pillow, smoke, outerspace, net, mysterious network, unreliable, security, sadness, relaxed, overused, oh goody a hacker'south dream, storage, movies, money, retentiveness, dorsum-up, joy, innovation, drugs, heaven and a place to meet. But 16 percent got the definition most right.

Schematic diagram of the cloud. (Image credit: Creative Eatables Attribution-Share Akin 3.0 Unported Sam Johnston)

Anytime a person uses a estimator, smartphone or tablet to access data or services stored or hosted elsewhere, they are engaging in cloud computing. For instance, online banking, online shopping, social networking, and remote storage of photos, music or videos are all deject-based services. While deject computing refers to engaging in these online activities, the cloud is sort of an umbrella term for the places where all that remote data is stored, as well as the information itself. [Is it Possible to Retrieve Data When My Computer Fails?]

According to a briefing from the Great britain Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN), cloud data, services and infrastructure possess the post-obit characteristics: They are remotely hosted, accessible from anywhere, and they are commodified, meaning you pay for what you use just like with gas and electricity.

Nevertheless a scrap foggy on the cloud? You lot may be overthinking it. As the UKOLN puts it, the cloud is really just a metaphor for the Internet.

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Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics author and editor for Quanta Mag. She holds a available's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the Academy of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her piece of work on the edifice of the James Webb Infinite Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The All-time American Scientific discipline and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Scientific discipline. She was the 2016 winner of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an almanac prize for immature scientific discipline journalists, also every bit the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics.