Oh, the Cloud, the magical wonderful Cloud that you hear about in the news that moves data across the white fluffy windows in the sky. The magical Cloud dispersed bits of data across the world in itty bitty raindrops, right? No, that's not how the Cloud works at all, but you'd be surprised how many people believed that. There's no doubt you've heard the term Cloud in the news or from other people. Your photos are stored in the Cloud, your email is stored in the Cloud. Cloud computing is the concept that you can access your data, use applications, store files, et cetera, from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. But the Cloud isn't a magical thing. It's just a network of servers that store and process our data. You might have heard the word data center before. A data center is a facility that stores hundreds, if not thousands of servers. Companies with large amounts of data have to keep their information stored in places like data centers. Large companies like Google and Facebook usually own their own data centers because they have billions of users that need access to their data at all times. Smaller companies could do this, but usually rent out part of a data center for their needs. When you use the Cloud service, this data is typically stored in the data center or multiple data centers, anywhere that's large enough to hold the information of millions, maybe even billions of users. It's easy to see why the Cloud has become a popular way of computing in the last few years. Now instead of holding onto terabytes of storage space on your laptop, you can upload that data to a file storage service like Dropbox, which stores that data in a managed location like a data center. The same goes for your organization. Instead of managing your own servers, you can use internet services that handle everything for you including security updates, server hardware, routine software updates, and more. But with each of these options come a few drawbacks. The first is cost. When you buy a server, you pay upfront for the hardware. That way, you can set up your services like a file storage at potentially very little cost because you're the one managing it. When you use Internet services like Dropbox, that offer file storage online, the starting cost may be smaller. But in the long term, costs could add up since you're paying a fixed amount every month. When comparing the cost of services, always keep in mind what a subscription could cost you for every user in your organization. Weigh that against maintaining your own hardware in the long term and then make a decision that works best for your organization. The second drawback is dependency. Your data is beholden to these platforms. If there's an issue with the service, someone other than you is responsible for getting it up and running again. That could cost your company precious loss of productivity and data. No matter what method you choose, remember that you're still responsible for the problems that arise when there's an issue. If Dropbox is having an issue with your important user data, it's still your problem and you have to get it working again no matter what. To prevent a situation like that from popping up, you might consider backing up some critical data in the Cloud and on a physical disk. That way, if one system goes down, you have another way to solve the problem. Whether you choose to maintain physical service or use Cloud services, these are the type of things you need to think about when providing services to your company. In the next couple of lessons, we're going to talk about some of the other responsibilities of the system admin. We'll give you a high level overview of these, then dive even deeper later in this course.