New
#1
How safe is the Cloud?
I have a friend who wants to install Office 365. She is intrigued by The Cloud without really understanding what it is and this has attracted her to a version of Office that uses the Cloud. I'm afraid she has a rather exalted view of what the Cloud is: she is asking me whether she even has to take backups of her Word documents and powerpoint presentation if they are in the Cloud. She seems to think that they might be completely safe there and that it would be impossible to lose documents from the Cloud.
I have to admit to having very little detailed knowledge of the Cloud myself. I had assumed the Cloud is just a pretty name for servers that are as terrestrial as any other computer and therefore just as vulnerable to power failures, disk crashes, and the problems that affect ordinary computer users. I suspect that is entirely possible to lose documents or powerpoint presentations that are in the Cloud just as it is for the hard drive on my laptop to crash.
Am I correct? Would she still be well-advised to take regular backups of the things she puts on the Cloud? Or is the Cloud massively redundant with techniques like RAID5 so that even a hard disk crash on a Cloud server would not cause a loss of data?
Also, how secure is the Cloud? Let's say that the Cloud is working perfectly and has no hardware issues of any kind: how hard is it for someone to hack into the Cloud and steal her data? Or is everything coming and going thoroughly encrypted and invulnerable to interception? (Okay, I didn't really mean that last bit. I know that anything can be hacked if someone wants it badly enough. In her case, her files are mostly cooking recipes and family photos, not things affecting national security, so I'm just trying to figure out if it would be reasonably secure or if the average 4 year old could hack it on his Xbox without breaking a sweat.)