Chapt. 8 Digital Age

How has the move to digital information affected the communication tools important to both the business world and life outside of work?  How has the “digital age” affected you in your life?

Digital information has affected almost every aspect of our lives good and bad. Look around us and you'll see how wired we are. Thanks to the Internet virtually anything you want can be delivered to your door in a matter of days. Personal information is more accessible over the Internet as well -- you can look up everything from a long-lost cousin to the registered sex offenders in your neighborhood. Parents don't need to lose sleep waiting for their teenage child  to come home , they can just call their cell phone, or send an crazy text, to check up, sometimes that works! Before digital information we couldnt contact our children , friends, or family members that easliy. We had to use phones that took forever to dial or even pay phones. just how everyday people's personal lives have changed so has the business world too. Digitial information made business's life of communication so much easier. As far as when it comes to important files for a business they now can store them on a computer instead of in a file cabinet where it could get messy. Instead of using regular postage mail they can now use email. Smartphones nd Iphones have been it easir for people to work from home because they are basically mini computers you can hold wit your hand.

QUESTION #4/ cloud storage

What are the computer's main storage devices, and how can i evaluate whether they match my needs? Storage devices for a typical computer system may include a hard drive, an SSD drive, a flash drive, and CD and DVD drives. Blue-ray devices are gaining in popularity for viewing and burning high-density media. When you turn off your computer, the data stored in these devices remains. These devices are referred to as nonvolatile storage devices. Hard drives have the largest storage capacity of any storage device and are the most economical. Cloud Storage : For some computer owners, finding enough storage space to hold all the data they've acquired is a real challenge. Some people invest in larger hard drives. Others prefer external storage devices like thumb drives or compact discs. Desperate computer owners might delete entire folders worth of old files in order to make space for new information. But some are choosing to rely on a growing trend: cloud storage. IDrive has a wide range of product offerings and some excellent features to boot. Mobile access to your files from your Android mobile or iPhone is just one of the great offerings from this company. IDrive has received some excellent reviews form TechCrunch, engadget and CNET and live up to those reviews with their great product offerings. Features •Continuous protection of data •Hands-free data backups •CleanUp service matches desktop data to the stored account data •Automatic file selection and scheduling •Mapped drive backup support and external hard drives •IDrive Explorer is a virtual view of account access •Thirty restore versioning •Web interface search and restore feature Security IDrive promotes a 128 bit SSL encryption on out-going and in-going transfers with AES 256 bit storage encryption. This comes fairly standard on most cloud storage hosting, but the difference with IDrive is that they guarantee not to store the user key on any IDrive servers. While this is a major positive in terms of security, in terms of personal access, it is very important not to lose that encryption key. IDrive has numerous data centers in which to store their client’s data offsite. This is an absolute must in protecting data, especially if trying to comply with corporate standards for disaster recovery initiatives. Storage Space IDrive offers something that not a lot of other cloud storage providers do and that’s free storage. IDrive provides everyone with 5GB of free storage for any type of document or file. The 5GB obviously won’t be enough for even a small business, but for personal use by a family, 5GB would be plenty to hold a decent size selection of music or photos. Small sized and medium sized businesses would probably need to go with the IDrive Pro service which offers anywhere from 150 GB to 1TB. Personal use prices are less expensive than the IDrive Pro plan for business so business customers should expect to pay more. YOU CAN GET THIS WONDERFUL SYSTEM ALL FOR $4.95!!!