The Advantages of Cloud Computing to Both Individual Consumers and Large Businesses
Today there is much discussion about cloud computing. Some folks are for it, some against it, and many have no idea what the discussion is all about. What is cloud computing and why should you care? Cloud computing basically refers to the use of external networks. For years when diagrams have been drawn, cloud-like shapes have been used to designate external networks. Someone, somewhere, starting using the term cloud, and it stuck. An external network, or cloud, is merely data that is provided and/or saved on external servers that belong to someone else. Many of us have been using cloud services for some time without really realizing it. Take your email service, for example. Do you use a major email service such as Yahoo! or Gmail? If you do, whenever you log into your email account you are really logging onto an external server upon which your emails are stored. When you save an email, it is not being saved on your computer, but on an external server, or cloud. Another example o...