Question

explain “cloud computing” cite your source of information

Answer 1

Cloud computing in very simple terms, is basically where a company uses someone elses computing services (usually over the internet) instead of having to run that software on their own computers.

Concrete examples are: in our very small business, we can't afford to have an IT department and people to manage our internal services. But we still need to use a variety of software, some simple examples are: accounting, file storage, shared calendars, shared contacts, etc. So we use a range of cloud computing services such as Dropbox, Google Calendar.

In other businesses cloud computing includes a lot more than these simple examples that you might be familiar with, it might include anything ranging from supplying data, to supplying testing environments.

The implication of this is that we, and other businesses have access to many more computing services than we would otherwise, and for much lower cost because we don't have to pay for the IT equipment, and more importantly the IT staff and expertise. However, cloud computing has its downsides, importantly there is an issue of data security - you're basically handing over your data to a third party, you are trusting the third party to keep your data safe (from hackers) and secure (from accidental data loss). For example we do run our own internal file server as we don't want to hand over our files to someone else, but still need a remotely accessible and secure file store (but we still use Dropbox for simple non-critical stuff).

Why cloud computing is useful is because it allows computing resources to be minimised - instead of 100 companies running one server each just to host some shared calendars, these 100 companies could instead use cloud computing services offered by a cloud computing provider, who would run just one server to serve up calendars for each of the companies. Each of the 100 companies now pay the fraction of the price to have shared calendars, and the cloud computing provider only has to run one server to serve al these companies, so would be raking it in.

An analogy would be: instead of every house employing their own full time car mechanic, dentist, doctor, plumber, electrician; we were to put all these people in a centralized location, and people shared out their services. This is much cheaper for individual households, and the people who employ these people are able to offer their services to lots of people.