If Cloud Computing Isn’t Just Marketing – What Is It?
The promise of Cloud Computing is genuinely superb. The concept is that IT Services will become like a utility that you plug in and pay for as you use.
What does that mean? Let’s use an analogy. Back in the early days of electricity you couldn’t just plug in your appliance into the wall to get electricity and pay for what you used as you used it.
Companies who wanted to use electricity had to install their very own electricity generator. Of course some bright spark thought …
“Why don’t I generate electricity, cable it into people’s homes and businesses and bill them for what they use. It will be simpler and easier for them, it will cost them a lot less than installing their own generator and there will still be some profit in it for me.”
Cloud Computing is just like this - It’s a utility.
Instead of paying for your own copy of an application and installing in your office somebody will already have done all that for you on their own servers. You just plug in via the internet and pay according to the number of users that you have each month.
Instead of holding your own data on servers in your office you will hold your data on somebody else’s servers and access it from wherever you are via the internet. They will provide you with more space as you need it and bill you each month according to usage. You won’t need to bother about backup any longer. They will automatically back it all up for you and restore it if you have a problem.
