What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a couple of different things, depending on if you're a business or consumer you'll think of it slightly differently. The cloud is basically the internet, so it's internet computing, Amazon, IBM, Google etc all have cloud computing services. What this lets you do is, instead of having to rent hardware and software and manage infrastructure to host a website, you can deploy it on Amazon or Google's existing infrastructure. The other advantage is because you're not hiring physical hardware you can scale up and down as you need so if your load suddenly goes up you're only paying for what you're using right now, if the load suddenly goes down again you haven't got a whole host of machines sitting idle. From a consumer point of view, it's really the idea that you can keep your information in a cloud or on the Internet you don't have to keep it on your computer. The beauty of this is if your computer breaks it's all stored elsewhere so all you need to do is get a new computer, plug it into the internet and everything you had there is still there. For example, Google Docs, this allows you to create documents online, you can type up, or you can right a report or maybe use a spread sheet, and if your computer explodes it doesn't matter, because the next time you get on the internet that document will still be there it was stored on Google's servers. In addition, you can share with other people, and you can invite them to collaborate on your documents and you can actually both edit in real time once that's done you can easily publish it as a web page and make it available to the rest of your organisation or the wider world