Gone are the days when storage space used to be something very precious; even uploading a few images would choke your computer because the storage space that you had was so minimal. However, with the advent of cloud computing technologies, storage space is no more a constraint and you can store large video and audio files in the cloud without any difficulty at all. Cloud computing has played a rather aggressive role in driving social networks and led to new innovations and improvements in social networking.

What is cloud computing?

To put it simply, cloud computing is delivery of services and applications across the Internet; using the cloud hosting model, both enterprises and individuals can use hardware and software which are run and monitored by third parties in remote sites.

What are social networks?

Social network refers to an organizational structure comprising of entities which have been interlinked by different relations. The entities are the “users” and relationships among these users have been given different names like followers or friends. Users can share messages or information or media through these relationships. Today, you will come across many popular online social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These boasts of more than a million members and this is why social networking is such a craze today.

How are cloud computing and social networking related?

Cloud computing basically entails the access of resources through such a network. While the resources many refer to data storage or servers or network connections, they are not limited to only these resources.

Cloud hosting helps to reduce costs because you can get the resources from third parties and scale the resources up and down depending on the traffic fluctuations. You can avail of additional resources without having to buy costly hardware or software. Moreover, with cloud computing, data becomes accessible from any location on the globe as long as there is Internet connectivity. So, social networks and cloud computing are intermingled in many different ways.

How is social networking using cloud computing?

• To start with, social networks may be hosted in a cloud environment and it can enjoy scalable applications. The cloud based apps use social networks for authentication and user management. Social networking sites have millions of users spread across different locations and this is why they are most suited for cloud adaptation. The social networks have also helped to improve web usability because they store rich multimedia content within cloud networks. For instance, audio and video files take up maximum space and can slow down any website. Vendors like Amazon or Salesforce are offering Customer Relationship Management or CRM and Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP services through cloud servers. This helps the end users to enjoy a high degree or scalability and flexibility without having to buy costly hardware and software.

• Besides storing heavy data, social networks use cloud computing for data analytics. So, users can get a lot of structured and non-structured information very quickly. A typical example is the new and improved analytics which Facebook displays for the benefit of its corporate users.

• With cloud computing, backup costs and data recovery costs have been dramatically reduced. When data is kept in one location, the risks of losing the data in times of a disaster are high. Recovery of lost data becomes next to impossible. However, with cloud computing, the data is stored in remote servers and remains accessible across the globe. This helps social networking websites which will store private data of its users which they cannot afford to misplace under any circumstances.

To end therefore, cloud computing and social networks have a mutually dependable relationship. The benefits of cloud computing for social networks are many and more are likely to come into light in the near future. Messaging apps such as Snapchat depend on user privacy and these are likely to take advantage of such cloud computing services to offer a more secure service to their clients. You use cloud computing technologies every day of your life, whether it is to send messages or to upload a video or to store images. The main idea behind social networking is to reach out to the target audience and this is exactly what you can hope to achieve if you have information stored in the cloud. This is because when data is stored in the cloud, anyone with Internet connectivity can get hold of this data.