After 2 hard drive crashes in as many years l am moving my business into the Cloud.

By now most folks know that the cloud is simply a metaphor for the use of applications and storage online. When we work in the cloud we do so using programs that are stored on someone else’s network. We access these programs via usernames and passwords rather than installing them on our own machines and likewise our data is stored elsewhere. Twitter is a free cloud-based service. We log in, we tweet and our tweets are stored for us. There are paid services as well, which allow us to do almost anything that a computer is capable of.

The great benefit of cloud computing is that a business like mine can add capabilities and flexibility without purchasing additional hardware. If I want more storage space, I can pay a monthly fee for it. Then, I can access the items I have stored from different devices, almost anywhere as long as I have internet access and know my username and password.

The great drawback of cloud computing is that I am limited by the speed of my device, its internet connection and the network I am accessing. This is how Twitter came to be known as the fail whale. Twitter is huge, and when tons of people try to access it at once their servers have trouble keeping up.

Over the next few weeks I’ll write about my experience of getting started in the cloud and I encourage you to share yours in the comments as we go.