The Evolution Of Cloud Storage: A blog post on the evolution of cloud storage and how that changes it.

Cloud computing is all about renting computing services. This idea first came in the 1950s. In making cloud computing what it is today, five technologies played a vital role. These are distributed systems and its peripherals, virtualization, web 2.0, service orientation, and utility computing.

Distributed Systems:
It is a composition of multiple independent systems but all of them are depicted as a single entity to the users. The purpose of distributed systems is to share resources and also use them effectively and efficiently. Distributed systems possess characteristics such as scalability, concurrency, continuous availability, heterogeneity, and independence in failures. But the main problem with this system was that all the systems were required to be present at the same geographical location. Thus to solve this problem, distributed computing led to three more types of computing and they were-Mainframe computing, cluster computing, and grid computing.
Mainframe computing:
Mainframes which first came into existence in 1951 are highly powerful and reliable computing machines. These are responsible for handling large data such as massive input-output operations. Even today these are used for bulk processing tasks such as online transactions etc. These systems have almost no downtime with high fault tolerance. After distributed computing, these increased the processing capabilities of the system. But these were very expensive. To reduce this cost, cluster computing came as an alternative to mainframe technology.

How does cloud storage work? Cloud storage works by using at least one data server connected to the Internet. When a user sends files over the Internet to the data server, the cloud storage saves a copy. When the user wants to retrieve this information, they access the data server through a web-based interface.