A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. A rose by any other name is just a rose.
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
* A Cloud by any other name is just an Internet Server.
Clouds by definition were meant to be “cloudy” … The cloud terminology comes from many years of network diagram drawings where the Internet or the “Big Network out of Here” was drawn as a CLOUD. It was meant to be an abstraction of the Big Network / Internet that your local network and computers are connected to. There was usually no reason to show the details of the Whole Internet or the ISP’s Network in such drawings. And the actual path getting somewhere is often dynamic and changing anyway … as Internet routing goes. Your path might change or your path to some web property might not be the same as the path back to you – with the response you are waiting for.
But Cloud Computing has grown to be an industry almost by itself. And cloudy stuff has to be built into just about everything. Clouds are in operating system, clouds are in portable devices.
To the end user these days CLOUD is usually an Online Storage Medium. A place in which to put your files … and in many cases to be able to Have Them Everywhere on-the-go. Let’s say you put some pictures and documents in your cloud service account from your desktop … you could retrieve them from your portable device later while you are on the road. (Or on the ocean.) But like I said … it’s still just an Internet Storage system … and you have to download from the other end (other device or computer) when you fetch it later. That means (on boats) over whatever is the currently available Internet connection. And if there isn’t one (Internet Connection) then there isn’t any CLOUD available for you.
So the cloud by any other name … is on the Internet. And if you might be without the Internet – you might want to bring those files along with you. Of course there is also Local Clouds … Things that might be provided on your local network at your premises or on your boat. Your boat might provide Network Attached Storage of some sort … providing a place for files of all sorts to be stored and perhaps shared.
P.S. I might have mentioned before … we have always had CLOUD files availability – even before it was called CLOUD. We had FTP – File Transfer Protocol. And later the HTTP – Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (which transfers things besides text as well) … People that maintain web sites will be familiar with that – unless they are so new that it has been hidden by some graphical web-based thing that does it in the background.
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Alan Spicer Marine Telecom
+1 954 683 3426
communications @ marinetelecom.net