It is quite incredible what can be done with computers and technology these days. Things have come a very long way since the days when mainframes would occupy entire floors on buildings, use huge amounts of power and be able to process very little – certainly very little by the modern standards of today. The entire world of computing has changed so much and as coders and developers constantly try to innovate and stay ahead of their competition and of the hackers who are always looking to breach security and wreak havoc. In fact, it is in direct response to these nefarious hackers that much remote and cloud-based technology has been pioneered. For those who don’t know what cloud-based technology is, here are a few examples.
Testing Environments
If you thought a testing environment was what Robert Falcon Scott and his charges encountered on their failed attempt to the South Pole, then you are wrong. A testing environment is a place where software developers can test the veracity of their code. A good example of a platform that allows for this is Microsoft’s Azure Remote Access which is a cloud-based service that allows those with access to test, deploy, and manage projects and applications through a network of remote data centres. Sometimes referred to as SaaS or software as a service, this is a good example of an innovative product that allows multiple coders on a team to test products collectively in a remote environment.
Do it yourself
Everyone has that relative who struggles more than everyone to complete the most basic tasks on a PC. A father who cannot send an email; a mother who can’t get her printer to work or an uncle who lost a file and doesn’t know where to find it. And if you are the go-to person who always gets called in the ‘emergency’ then knowing how to connect to another PC remotely is a great skill to have. It is a pretty simple process really that can be set up either by searching for the instructions online or by clicking the following commands from your start menu: computer, remote settings, users, remote desktop, add. It’s very easy!
Drop Box
This is quickly becoming the storage solution of choice for people who once kept all their valuable documents and memories on external drives. Much more robust, a whole lot easier to relocate with and never stolen or lost, Drop Box is a simple cloud-based solution that has become increasingly effective as bandwidth issues have declined and more people have adopted it – meaning economies of scale have brought the prices of their services down.
These days there is hardly anyone that doesn’t have a Google account. Primarily used for email, replacing the old Outlook or desktop solutions, Google is also a calendar and a storage service that allows for all your business documents to be stored in the cloud and accessed remotely. Not only that though, through something like Google Docs you are also able to work collaboratively as a team, each person with access able to edit and view the most current version of the project in real time.