I’m not really clear about all of this. What is stored in “the cloud”?
It’s like everyone’s hard drive is in the cloud”. So you go online to get your information.
iCloud is a syncing service. It makes sure that you have the same files, documents, music, and apps on all your devices: Macs, iPads, iPhones, iPod touches. For example, if you buy a song on your iPod, it gets downloaded automatically onto your iPhone, iPad, and iTunes on your Mac when you are online.
Basically, the concept of “the cloud” is a centralized data-storage for documents/databases/media/etc. on the ‘net.
Amazon has been using this concept for some time for Kindle content - with your purchased books being available to all of your internet-enabled devices (not just the Kindle device). They somewhat recently added amazon-purchased music to their version of “cloud” storage.
The general idea is that you can have your music library, video library, ebooks, and whatever documents you want available to you wherever you roam, so long as you have internet access. The logical progression is to have everything that we traditionally have to keep up with (storage) “safely stored” on a server somewhere.
From a convenience viewpoint, this is the coolest, most convenient development in computing in a very long time...
BUT - as others have pointed out - there are concerns with security - both from the ever-present danger of both “private” hackers and data thieves, to government-sponsored cyber-terrorism, as well as the obvious worry about OUR OWN government! Privacy... what privacy?