Computer Awareness Quiz: Cloud Storage and Online Collaboration Tools

Google Drive, launched in 2012, keeps a user files on Google servers, synchronises them to every signed-in device and opens them in Docs, Sheets and Slides for editing in the browser, which is exactly what cloud storage means.

In this model the provider runs finished software on its own servers and the user simply opens it in a browser, as with Gmail, Google Docs, Microsoft 365 or Salesforce, paying by subscription instead of buying a licence and installing it.

Google Docs is finished software delivered through a browser; the user installs nothing, manages no server and only works on the document, which is the definition of Software as a Service.

DigiLocker was launched in 2015 as part of the Digital India programme of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and it gives every citizen a cloud account linked to Aadhaar in which boards, universities and transport departments place verified certificates that are accepted on a par with the original…

MeghRaj is the brand name of the Government of India Cloud, under which the National Informatics Centre runs the National Cloud so that ministries and state departments can host applications and data without buying separate servers for every project.

A hybrid cloud joins a private deployment with a public one so that confidential records stay inside the organisation while ordinary or seasonal workloads run on rented public resources, and data can move between the two.

OneDrive is the cloud storage of Microsoft, built into Windows and into the Microsoft 365 suite; it began life under the name SkyDrive and was renamed OneDrive in 2014 after a trademark dispute.

Amazon S3 was launched in 2006 and was among the first large public cloud offerings. It stores data as objects inside containers called buckets rather than as files in folders, and it is used by websites and applications across the world to hold images, backups and logs.

The cloud is reached over a network, so working permanently offline is the opposite of what the model offers; the dependence on connectivity is in fact listed among the limitations of cloud computing.

Services such as Google Docs and Microsoft 365 save a copy of a document each time it changes, show who edited what and allow a user to restore an older version, which is what makes group editing safe.