Following on from Dave Thomas's Introduction to Cloud, he continues with Part 2:
So we’ve established that the Cloud is actually the Internet but it offers something called ‘Cloud Computing’. My aim with this article is to help you understand what Cloud Computing actually gives you.
From a simplistic point of view Cloud Computing is nothing other than web services and applications provided from the Internet. A basic example of Cloud Computing, is the email service offered by the likes of Google, Yahoo etc. allowing us to access our accounts from any PC in the world.
We can take this example further with Salesforce.com who offer not only customer relationship management software but a platform in the Cloud to run the software and also store the data for you. A business that uses Salesforce will have all of their client and prospect data held within the Salesforce application and have it hosted on servers provided by Salesforce. This then then allows the business users to have access to their data no matter where they are. The business doesn’t have to worry about capital outlay, system upgrades, backups and disaster recovery solutions.
A further example is the fact that I’m writing these notes on an application called Evernote which stores my articles in the Cloud meaning that I can access them on my PC, iPad and iPhone with just a few clicks of the mouse. Other examples of Cloud Computing are:
» Document hosting
» Backup services
» Virtual servers for Windows or Linux
» Programming environments
» Web server hosting
» Database hosting
» Shared Accounting applications
To read more click here.
