Technological Growth

The Technology on the internet is rapidly growing to a point where it’s beginning to provide you with things you never even knew you wanted till they gave it to you. This growth in technology has made out life much easier and allows for extra security of things on cloud storage and being able to access all your information no matter where you are on a wireless device.

Cloud Storage

Large companies such as windows live SkyDrive offer free storage for all your documents on the internet. The data you decide to keep there is put into virtual lockers that you can go in and out of whenever you like as long as you have an internet connection.

Advantages

• All online, with all your information saved on the internet you don’t have to make backup copies onto anything like a pen drive or cd’s or an external hard drive. You can get to everything and you know it’s safe. Plus it’s not taking up physical space in your office. It might be ok as an individual because everything might fit onto one or two external hard drives. For the average person it just saves a lot of time but for a company it would take hundreds of hard drives to keep copies of all their different databases etc.

• Easy Access, with cloud storage transportation becomes the easiest thing in the world. No need to carry it with you because all you have to do is log in online and you have everything you need sat right in front of you.   

• Price, the price is right! For the average person using cloud storage the 100GB free that most service providers give is more than enough and you never need to upgrade to the £3.50 of whatever the tariff per month to have more space.

Disadvantages

• Security, having everything backed up is great; you’re not going to lose anything theoretically. However it leaves all your information and files in the hands of the service provider. Should for some reason it gets wiped all your information is gone and it’s a lot easier to hack into information saved in cloud storage than into your computer itself. So perhaps it only ok if what your saving in there is simply family photos but anything you care about the rest of the world seeing is best to be kept on your own computer behind password etc.

• Time, so it saves time instead of backing it up but because you’re doing it over the internet rather than onto a removable storage space it could take longer to upload and download information.

Packet switching

Packet switching is the sending of packets of data in digital networking used for communication. The internet is of course the most popular place that uses packet switching.  The way packet switching works is by dividing the data into separate package so that every letter is sent separately. The separate packages can take completely different routes to get to the destination and after all of the packages from the same message get to the desired destination they are reassembled into the correct order.
Packet switching of course helps in the process of protecting information as it is sent across the internet because the data has been divided into separate parts. The contribution this has to the internet is massively substantial because we are able to send personal details across the internet without the worry that their information will get stolen and used in identity theft etc.

Domain Names

IP addresses are unrecognisable to humans and we would find it difficult to remember them. The system of the domain naming system is hierarchical for computers and translates the domain name into an IP address saving us a lot of hassle

The point of domain names is that we all remember what the name of our favourite clothing brand or can remember a word that they want to visit the website of. And can easily remember hundreds of website domain names because they are exactly the same as the name of the shop etc. e.g. Newlook.com where we would only be able to remember a handful of 12 digit IP addresses that to us appear to be simply a random set of numbers.

Mobile devices

The ability to connect to the internet anywhere is most obviously one of the biggest key developments to the growth of the internet. The use of wireless also allows for areas at home and work to be less crowded. So not the entire internet connected devices need to be in the same room because they all need to be attached to the same router. They can be spaced out across a large room or in separate rooms as long as they are within reach of the wireless connection.

The use of wireless has expanded massively in the last few years and has spread from just laptops, IPhones, smart phone and iPod etc. A problem though is that with loads of people attaching to the same wireless network they are all sharing the same router so space on the bandwidth is stretched making the internet on each device run slower. This however can be fixed by buying faster internet although this can be expensive.

This ability to always connect to the internet has made the use of internet by the average person grow massively because we use it all the time rather than just when we get home. We use it to check our emails constantly throughout the day as well as on transport when bored etc.