What exactly is Cloud Computing?

What exactly is this Cloud Computing thing all about? What does it mean for  businesses?

There has been a lot of buzz recently about cloud computing and how it has the potentials to change everything. In this article, I will lay out in simple terms what exactly cloud computing is, what makes it so hot and what this change means for business, governance, education and other sectors of the economy.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is location independent computing, where shared or dedicated servers provide resources, software and data on demand.

Cloud Computing allows us to access our data anywhere from any device when we want it. Cloud Computing allows a lot of interesting things including the fact that I can start typing this article on my smartphone and finish it on my Laptop. I continue from one device to another seamlessly without having to “copy” out my files and “paste” inside the  new device. Indeed, with Cloud Computing you will never need a flash drive again and you will not need to email files to yourself either. You always have access to your digital life – all documents, music, videos, software, and games. Everything is always with you, regardless of your physical location.

The Cloud becomes the central place we build our digital lifes around, all our computing devices (smartphones, tablets and PCs) become dumb portals that serve as a means of quikly connecting us to our cloud services

Tech has always been making location irrelevant, and the rise of cloud computing further buttresses the point.

What makes it so hot?

Cloud Computing is hot because it allows us to have some interactions and operations that where not previously possible.

Applications based on the cloud are better, we are always using the latest one and we are protected against data lose. A cloud based application is Gmail. Have you ever considered upgrading Gmail to the latest version? Or perhaps I should ask: what version of Gmail are you using?

Cloud Computing has made such questions irrelevant. Unlike the Microsoft Office 2007 on my laptop that is in dire need of an upgrade, cloud based products and services are always been constantly improved and the latest version is automatically installed for all users immediately, you might not even get notified about upgrades to the software, but they happen all the time.

Cloud Computing has great advantages and benefits that it offers everyone, I will just take a brief look at some of them.

Equal access for all

Cloud Computing has levelled the playing ground of IT framework, anyone can now use cloud services to power business applications on a scale never imagined before.

More powerful tools

Cloud Computing provides the fundamental tools for developers to create business apps that are more effective and powerful. We have seen a rise in Cloud based software been deployed for businesses and less software on-premises, in fact, some forward thinking Entrepreneurs now work 100% from the cloud

One Central databank

With the cloud, Government agencies can easily create a central database to store all documents centrally. Several offices will no longer need to keep copies of the same documents. Allowing for greater collaboration