Confused by the cloud?

Are you still confused by the term cloud computing? According to Wikipedia, "Cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet." In other words, cloud computing allows you to access resources over the Internet rather than storing those resources in-house.

More Cloud Terminology

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) - With the IaaS model, organizations essentially rent business resources (such as servers, network equipment, memory, CPU, disk space, and data center facilities) from a service provider and pay for these resources based on actual use. An example of infrastructure as a service is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
• Platform as a service (PaaS) - With PaaS, a vendor hosts a set of software and development tools on their infrastructure. Developers can then use this platform to create and customize applications over the Internet. Force.com is an example of PaaS.
• Software as a service (SaaS) - SaaS refers to a distribution model in which software applications are hosted by a vendor and accessed by customers over the Internet. This differs from the traditional model in which software is installed on a personal computer.