The “Cloud” is simply a metaphor to describe the internet in laymen’s terms. When you connect to our website, you are using the Cloud. When you send an email using Hotmail or Gmail, you are using the Cloud. When you have an internet connection, you have a “Cloud connection”.
If you are a client in California and upload a photo to CleanPix and later your customer downloads that file from Brazil, it’s possible because we exist in the Cloud. This kind of example is known as “Cloud storage”. Simply, your file is stored somewhere in the world that is available anywhere you can connect with the internet: The Americas, Europe, Asia, Japan …anywhere.
What is Cloud Computing?
If you have ever heard of Cloud Computing, you can begin to guess what that means. When you load an app on your phone or start a program on your computer, you are “computing” on your own machine, because that software runs in your machine. However, when you use the Google Docs application (their online text processor), your own computer is not responsible for running that specific program. Instead, Google is “computing” in the Cloud for you (or in another way: Google is running an application that is available to you from somewhere on the internet).
In the same way, our CleanPix application runs in the cloud and is made available to you via our website. You don’t have to download and run any program yourself.
What about Cloud storage?
While the term “Cloud” has only been used widely as a marketing term recently, the idea of it has been around as long as we have had the internet. CleanPix (now in its 10th year!) has offered this kind of “Cloud storage” service from the very beginning. We host (store) your files in our secure international locations somewhere on the internet (the Cloud).
The advantages to this are straightforward… our clients do not need to maintain, upgrade or buy extra servers for themselves and the files are available wherever you go. Looking back over the years, CleanPix has been one of the forerunners for what is now becoming popular and the desirable thing to do and we’ve been doing so for a very long time. Lets remember, the internet was barely in its teens when we started.
What is a CDN (content distribution network)?
One of the recent breakthroughs that the “Cloud” provides is a content distribution network (CDN). When you use CleanPix, you have access to a world class network that intelligently and securely moves your file to a location closest to where you are downloading from. For example, if you are downloading from California, the file you want will be available from Seattle. If you are downloading from Brazil, that same file will be moved to Florida. These are just possible examples, but what it means is that you and your users have fast and reliable downloads even if you aren’t close to our Headquarters. The core advantage a CDN provides is blazing fast speed and reliability, even for huge files.
The Cloud is the internet. It is really that simple. As innovations have developed and matured, those marketing experts have decided its easier to use the Cloud metaphor to illustrate the fluidity and “everywhereness” that is becoming more widely available everyday. And when you use CleanPix, you will leverage that flexibility  for your own organization.
