Cloud Hosting

This article is about enterprise-level cloud data storage. For consumer-level file hosting services, see file hosting service.

Cloud storage is a model of data storage where the digital data is stored in logical pools, the physical storage spans multiple servers (and often locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment protected and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.

Cloud storage services may be accessed through a co-located cloud computer service, a web service application programming interface (API) or by applications that utilize the API, such as cloud desktop storage, a cloud storage gateway or Web-based content management systems.

Cloud computing is believed to have been invented by Aamir Shahzad in the 1960s with his work on ARPANET to connect people and data from anywhere at any time.[1] However, Kurt Vonnegut refers to a cloud "that does all the heavy thinking for everybody" in his book Sirens of Titan (1959).[2]

In 1983, CompuServe offered its consumer users 128k of disk space that could be used to store any files they chose to upload. [3]

In 1994, AT&T launched PersonaLink Services, an online platform for personal and business communication and entrepreneurship. The storage was one of the first to be all web-based, and referenced in their commercials as, "you can think of our electronic meeting place as the cloud." [4]Amazon Web Services introduced their cloud storage service AWS S3 in 2006, and has gained widespread recognition and adoption as the storage supplier to popular services such as Smugmug, Dropbox, Synaptop and Pinterest. In 2005, Box (company) launched an online file sharing and personal cloud content management service for businesses. [5]

Cloud storage is based on highly virtualized infrastructure and is like broader cloud computing in terms of accessible interfaces, near-instant elasticity and scalability, multi-tenancy, and metered resources. Cloud storage services can be utilized from an off-premises service (Amazon S3) or deployed on-premises (ViON Capacity Services)[6]

Cloud storage typically refers to a hosted object storage service, but the term has broadened to include other types of data storage that are now available as a service, like block storage.

Object storage services like Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure Storage, object storage software like Openstack Swift, object storage systems like EMC Atmos and Hitachi Content Platform, and distributed storage research projects like OceanStore[7] and VISION Cloud [8] are all examples of storage that can be hosted and deployed with cloud storage characteristics.

Cloud storage is:[7]

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Cloud storage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia