Cloud Computing, a Simple Definition

Thousands of companies, from Fortune 500s to SMEs, are now rapidly moving to Cloud Computing services, platforms and infrastructure. Also, it's hard to find a major software vendor nowadays that's not positioning at least some of its products as a Cloud Computing technology. What is Cloud Computing and why is it so important?

Could computing is really just a fancy term for utility computing. In other words, applications, platforms or infrastructure are made available from a central service provider, similar to our utility companies for electricity, water and telecommunication. This simple concept has immense implications.

First, cost goes dramatically down since resources and operating costs are shared across more applications and users. Second, reliability and uptime go up since most cloud computing services provide fail-over and redundancy across thousands of servers and even multiple data-centers. Thirdly, cloud computing can provide better performance since calculations can be spread across the resources of multiple servers, and content can be placed on edge severs that are positioned close to the consumers of the content.

Companies, though, are concerned about security, control and vendor-lock-in issues that come with Cloud Computing. Each Cloud Computing provider needs to address these issues in order to reassure clients of reliable service.