Is Cloud Computing Really Computing in the Sky?

Is Cloud Computing Really Computing in the Sky?

Ah, no. Cloud computing has nothing to do with sky, weather, satellites or clouds for that matter. You may have heard about cloud computing this week in relation to the Google Gmail outage on Feb 24th and TechCrunch's explanation on the cause of the problem.

Cloud computing is considered the next step in the growth of computing and the Internet, where software (like office suites, and development platforms) are found on the Internet (in the cloud) and not on individual hard-drives. Examples include Salesforce.com and Google Apps which provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

That's it for the explanation on cloud computing - the debate on the pros and cons of cloud computing will be saved for another time.