Business Terms Glossary
Cloud Computing
Definition of Cloud Computing
What the heck is cloud computing, anyway? Cloud Computing defines a way of computing that is best described by what it is not.
In non-cloud computing, you know which computers are doing which things for you. You know where the programs you use are. You know where the data is. You know the make of the computer that is doing the work or storing the data.
Cloud computing breaks that mode by letting you tap into a black box of computing power that is somewhere out there, in the cloud, as they say. You access those cloud computers via the Internet. They could be in Hong Kong. They could be in Australia. The thing about cloud computing is that you don't need to know about the details of the cloud. You just put out a request and the cloud takes care of it.
It's not quite that simple because the program on your computer does have to be dealing with a known cloud. For example, Amazon offers cloud computing. You might open up a web page and behind the scenes the owner of that web page funnels your request over to the Amazon cloud, your request is processed by the cloud's computers, and the response is seamlessly sent back to you.
The nice thing about cloud computing is its scalability. A respectable cloud has enough computing power that you probably cannot easily overwhelm it. This is much better than the old days when a popular website or web application would crash when too many users overpowered the web server.
Hopefully, you get the general idea. The definition of cloud computing, is, well, a little bit cloudy because it's an amalgamation of a lot of concepts: software as a service (SaaS), utility computing, virtualization, managed service providers (MSPs), web services and the like.
Cloud Computing References On This Site
These Gaebler.com articles mention this glossary term:
- Inventing Buzzwords - So, for example, they might try to establish their companies and their executives as being thought leaders in "cloud computing," a buzzword that is gaining momentum these days. By...
- Inventing Buzzwords - So, for example, they might try to establish their companies and their executives as being thought leaders in "cloud computing," a buzzword that is gaining momentum these days. By...
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