What is Cloud computing

What is Cloud computing?

This article is aimed at giving a general idea for cloud computing. 

Cloud computing is a term used for the computing in which the services, software, data and other devices are provided by shared servers based on demand.  It does not depend on the location of these resources. You may be in any part of the world and using these resources from the remotest part.

Cloud computing is based on the virtualization, service oriented architectures and utility computing. For understanding cloud computing let’s compare the today’s computing with cloud computing.

In today’s form of computing we have all the resources at a location like hardware and software etc. This form of computing will incur cost of hardware, licensing cost software, maintenance of hardware, and other administrative charges.  The hardware will need to be of the configuration as to meet the needs of the software which will run on it.

The alternative and a more suitable cloud computing gives you the access to all the software that you need, without having to install all these on to your local machine.  You would just need to install one interface which connects your local machine to the cloud computing server.  These interfaces are in the form of web tools or applications which get you connected to remote servers providing cloud computing services.  This could simply be a web browser.

 These servers will provide you all the software and services that you need which you were doing locally on your machine.  The local computers would now be freed of extensive computer processing and thus can manage with lower computing capabilities.