Cloud computing facilitates access to shared infrastructure and resources, offering “on demand” services over the internet to perform operations. It provides facilities for users to manage, develop and deploy applications “on the cloud”. The location of devices or any physical resources accessed is usually unknown to an end user.
- Grid Computing
- Cloud Computing
Generic examples:
- Storage services like Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3)
- Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) offering computational facilities that allow people to use CPU cycles without buying more computers
- Salesforce.com, a Software as a service (SaaS) company, delivering customer relationship management (CRM) services, so clients can manage customer information without installing specialised software
- Companies such as Nirvanix allow organisations to store documents and data without adding an on-site server.