Office 365 For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1Getting to Know the Cloud

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding cloud computing, big data, and machine learning

Getting to know the top Microsoft cloud productivity solutions

Determining the right Office 365 plan for your organization

If you own an Android device, you most likely contributed to the estimated 15 exabytes of data stored in the Google “cloud.” And just what exactly is an exabyte? You can think of it in three ways:

An exabyte is equivalent to one quintillion bytes, or one billion gigabytes.

If the entire population of Thailand each owned a 16 GB smartphone, their data storage would be equivalent to one exabyte.

Supposedly, if you type 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 characters and print those characters on paper, you would have to cut down about 50,000 trees.

Simply put, there is a lot of data in the cloud, and it grows every day. This is why it isn’t unusual nowadays to hear the buzz phrase big data when talking about cloud computing.

Big data is simply a huge volume of data that cannot be stored or processed in the traditional way. Imagine processing the data from 400 million tweets a day from Twitter, or analyzing the patterns and behaviors of the 1 billion YouTube viewers ...