Cloud

The term cloud describes IT resources — storage, computing power, or software — provided not locally but in external providers' data centers and used over the internet. Instead of saving files on your own hard drive, they sit on the provider's servers and are reachable from any device. The benefits are flexibility, automatic syncing, and resilience; the trade-off is that you have to trust the provider. For sensitive data, the server location ✕ The server location is the country where your data is physically stored. It determines which data-protection laws apply to it. More in the glossary → , encryption ✕ Encryption turns readable data into unreadable code using a key. Only someone with the right key can read it again — the basis of secure communication and storage. More in the glossary → , and ideally the zero-knowledge ✕ Zero-knowledge means a provider has no access to your data or keys — only you can decrypt them. Even the provider "knows nothing." More in the glossary → principle matter. Find secure options in the best cloud storage comparison.