The cloud focuses a lot on businesses and what a company can get from it to make itself more successful, often with very little regard to what the home user can get. Thankfully, the consumer isn’t completely left out in the cold where the cloud is concerned.
HOME CLOUDS
Agile business models and elaborate disaster recovery plans aren’t always at the forefront of what the average user wants from a cloud service. So what can the consumer expect?
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The biggest section of the consumer cloud market is undoubtedly on-line storage. The likes of Dropbox, Google, Microsoft and Apple all cater for the home user with up to 5GB, or more in some circumstances, storage available. It’s all accessed via a friendly and easy to use portal, while integrating all your devices.
The second biggest consumer cloud service is email. Webmail has taken off in the last decade or so. moving away from traditional ISP or work-based email and offering the user an area where space is plenty, and there are very few restrictions applied.
MUSIC STREAMING
Thanks to cloud services we no longer have to own the music we want to listen to. Music streaming services such as Spotify and Audiobox, all offer the ability to push your musical choices to any device that’s connected to the company’s portal.
Looking for a new house? Most people will automatically open up Google Maps or Earth to view their potential new home, to see just how big the back garden really is Likewise. GPS from such sources as Here, Waze and OpenStreetMap are helping the consumer find their way around.
We’re all familiar with social networking but it doesn’t always strike people that social media is in some ways a cloud service. Loosely speaking, it’s a cloud communications (CMS) service, where users share information and connect to other users via a central service or portal, such as Facebook, Twitter and so on.
VIDEO STREAMING
Netflix is by far the most popular of the video streaming, cloud-based services In 2015, the company shut down its last datacentre and now adopts a 100% cloud-based structure, being fully reliant on Amazon’s Web Services
Since cloud computing has become significantly more powerful it’s now possible to enjoy gaming over the cloud GAAS, or Gaming As A Service, is a fast growing market where you’re able to play anything from triple-A titles to some of the classics from the past; and all from within a cloud service.
Being able to access your own, or someone else’s, desktop remotely is a great help to those who need to share a screen or aid a family member with a problem. Teamviewer, and other companies, make this easy through its cloud-based services.
Gaming in popularity is VPNAAS (Virtual Private Networking As A Service). This is a cloud-based service used to hide a user’s IP address and allow them to gain access to content held in other countries. It’s still early days but the service is growing
Cloud printing is a service that allows you to print over the Internet from anywhere, on any device. You can add and share your printers and print from any type of application. Google Cloud Print is one such example, with the likes of HP following suit.