Discussion:
The cloud, simply, refers to software and services that run on the Internet instead of your computer. Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Netflix, Amazon Cloud Drive, Flickr, Google Drive, Microsoft Office 365, Yahoo Mail — those are all cloud services.

So where does it all live? Instead of housing information on your hard drive or your phone’s memory, your stuff is stored in massive data centers around the world.

These companies’ massive server farms are so vast and so power-hungry that they are responsible for more than 2% of the United States’ electricity usage, according to researchers at Villanova University. If the global cloud computing industry was a single country, it would be the fifth-largest in the world in terms of energy consumption, according to Ed Turkel of Hewlett-Packard’s Hyperscale Business Unit.

Source: CNN Money

Date: September 4, 2014

Link: http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/03/technology/enterprise/what-is-the-cloud/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 

Questions for discussion:

1) Are there issues surrounding the use of so much electricity for these Cloud solutions?

2) Apple has been listed as one of the most un-green companies on the planet due to its use of electricity for its server farms.  Do people care?