“With all due respect, I am the head of IT and I have it on good authority – if you type “google” into Google you can break the internet – so please… no one try it, even for a joke.” Jen Barber, Relationship Manager, Reynholm Industries.

Despite what the IT Crowd may tell you – you can’t “break” the internet by typing google in to Google.

And that “cloud”  everyone keeps talking about in the computer world won’t crash if there’s a, ahem, storm.

But computer clouds do pose their own set of challenges…

It’s a bit like the way the electricity grid provides our power, the cloud will work like a utility to provide our computing resources.

Rather than doing a process on your own laptop or desktop, you send that task off to the cloud and use its processes, power and memory. Which means you don’t have to buy all that expensive equipment. Instead, you buy a smidge of time in the cloud.

“This means that you get to do things super fast, without needing the upfront investment in big boxes,” said Director of CSIRO’s ICT Centre, Dr Ian Oppermann.

“The challenges of the cloud are security and privacy, and we’re working with industry to find the solutions.”

Find out more about CSIRO’s cloud computing work.