Let’s say that you are a person who has relocated to a country far from your original home. Let’s also say that you love to take a lot of photographs and share them with friends and family. You use some social networking options to do this, but not everyone has these profiles and pages.

How do you share files with them across the thousands of miles? Do you spend hours attaching these files to emails and hope that they reach their destination? Do you ask a friend of a friend to print them out and send them on to a family member? Do you go very “old school” and print images to send in the mail?

While all of these things technically “work”, there is a far more amenable answer in the use of cloud storage.

Photographs in the Cloud?

No matter how technically challenged you feel yourself to be, or your family back home insists they are, the use of cloud storage enables you to easily share files with anyone you wish.

The best cloud storage options are instructable and shareable and let you indicate to the server who can have access to individual folders or files on your storage space. So, the reality is that you can remove the memory card from your camera, slide it into the computer or mobile device, open the folder in your cloud storage icon, and load all of the images to this space. You can create a single folder with all of the images or make a folder that you use to share images with friends and family.

You need only let them know about the folder, which the best cloud storage services help you to do via email, and then everyone just clicks open the folder and downloads the images they want. They can even upload files of their own to share with you or the entire family as well.

Applications for Business

Now, that example was for personal use, but it is easy to see how business professionals might use this same technology as well. They can share files between offices, clients, and colleagues in a very controlled manner. They can streamline communication, and they can use this sort of space to protect data to the highest degree possible.

The thing to remember about cloud storage is often that it can be found in a range of styles and designs. For example, there are individual online backup accounts designed for people who want to protect their personal data or share information easily.

Then there are the professional options that can allow a business of any size to backup system data, even if it is on NAS or network attached storage devices. This could mean the difference between existence and failure should a computer system experience damage of any kind.

For example, let’s say that you have a company with 30 employees, you run your own server, and you use a lot of emails on a daily basis. One day a single employee opens an email with malicious content and it quickly overwhelms the server and causes a full system crash. This might take you offline for hours or even days as IT professionals work to fix the problem.

Using online backup, cloud storage or just NAS backup could mean that you would be able to use different devices to access a web portal where all of your data, files, and emails are stored safely away. Thus, cloud storage shrinks the world but also gives some pretty impressive protection to businesses of all sizes.

Marco Bonanni of TAPNET.com urges individuals and businesses to always back u their data. Services like TAPNET online backup allows you to store your files on the cloud for easy access and security.