How does it work?

The best way to illustrate things is always through an example – so…

Say you’ve kept your first love letter. It means a lot to you. You’ve kept it neatly folded in a box all these years. But what if it was lost, got wet and damaged, was folded and unfolded so many times it just fell apart? Wouldn’t it be better to scan it into your computer and keep a digital version of it somewhere? It’s very precious, so remember you really want to make sure you can always read it.

Once it’s scanned into your computer it’s kept there, all nice and cosy in it’s own file. But what if the file became corrupt or you bought a new computer and forgot to move the file over? Another option available to you is to store your precious love letter in ‘The Cloud’.

So – you upload your love letter to the Cloud and now it’s flying around above you somewhere in the Internet. You’re able to read it anytime you want – through any device (remember, it’s not actually stored on your computer anymore), at anytime you want, from anywhere you can imagine (as long as there is Internet connectivity). But what if it got lost or stolen from ‘The Cloud’ somehow? How secure is this ‘Cloud’? Short of you actually hitting the delete (and confirm delete) buttons, that can’t really happen.

The reason is, when you uploaded your precious love letter it was actually (digitally) torn up into lots of tiny equally sized pieces, each of which was duplicated and stored in a different location around the world.

Those locations are highly secure with layers of encryption so all the tiny pieces are very very safe. So – if someone were to try and steal your love letter by breaking into one of those locations, they would only ever be able to see a very tiny piece of it – and even if they did decide to steal that tiny piece it’s ok – because that tiny piece has been duplicated across multiple locations, so you’d never actually lose your letter. Then – every time you want to read your precious love letter all the tiny pieces come together to form the letter as a whole – so you read the letter, you smile and close the letter down. It shoots off into the Internet again and you can rest in the knowledge that you’ll always be able to read it – wherever and whenever you want.

That – is ‘The Cloud’.