Who owns the cloud?

Remember floppy disks? Or CD-Rs? Or thumb drives? When you wanted to store files somewhere, you’d copy them to a physical medium that kept them. Then you’d use them at your leisure. You also installed programs from a floppy or a CD-ROM.

Not any more. The cloud has taken over.

Programs live in the cloud. Backups live in the cloud. Everything is on a server farm somewhere, not in a desk drawer.

But who actually owns the cloud?

What the cloud is

The “cloud” we’re referring to is simply made up of servers worldwide and the information stored on them.

Those servers live in air-conditioned data centers owned by everyone from huge multinational companies (Amazon Web Services, for example) to smaller mom-and-pop operations. That data is accessible from anywhere on Earth with Internet access.

So who owns it?

Think of it as a landlord-tenant relationship.

If you were to rent an apartment, you would pay money to the landlord each month. The landlord would allow you to live in that apartment as long as you kept paying money. Ownership of that apartment doesn’t pass to you. It’s still the landlord’s apartment. You just get to use the space.

On the flip side, everything in that apartment? Yours. Anything you buy or anything that was yours when you moved in still belongs to you, even though it’s in a space that you’re renting.

It works the same way with the cloud. You rent the “apartment” (the server space), but everything in it is still yours. The data you store on the cloud is still yours. To keep it in that location, you need to pay a regular fee.

The cloud has made a lot of things different. Don’t worry, though; what’s yours is still yours. If you have any questions about the cloud and how it can help your business, we’d be happy to talk.