What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is a computing model that lets you access software, server and storage resources over the Internet, in a self-service manner. Instead of having to buy, install, maintain and manage these resources on your own computer or device, you access and use them through a Web browser. Sometimes you might need to download a small piece of client code (i.e., software you install on your PC), but we'd still categorize that as cloud computing, because, for the most part, the real horsepower is supplied from the cloud. At this point, many of you may be asking, I still don't get why they call this "cloud" computing — why not Internet computing? The answer is that techies have long used cloud icons to represent the data centers, technologies, infrastructure and services that comprise the Internet — and the metaphor has stuck.
