I read last year that the Internet carries more than 1,800 Petabytes of information every day. That is an incredible number! As all of that data comes and goes, it is easy in this day and age to think of this information as being stored in the cloud, a magic box in the sky. All of that data is sitting somewhere, though.

On hard drives, installed inside servers, sitting inside datacenters. All this talk about the cloud has really morphed for companies into a debate about private clouds; when you break it down, though, what they are really talking about is different ways to provide a centralized group of information to users that may be accessing it from various places. There are numerous technologies baked into Server 2012 R2 that can assist with the centralization and securing of your data, so let's explore a few of them together.