Let me explain about cloud computing by using a scenario. Consider you are running a business and you want to expand it by using the latest softwares and powerful hardwares to support it. To expand your business you not only have to spend so much of money on softwares and hardwares but also to maintain it.So you end up spending money for the suppporing systems rather thans spending for the actual development and promotion of the business.The solution for this problem is cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a part of next generation technology called Web 2.0 by which the hardware and necessary softwares will be available in the centralized place called Datacenters. All you need to have is a high speed internet connection to access your applications.So there is no need for licensing softwares, powerful hardwares, LAN etc in your business location. You can focus only on your business and the supporting systems will be taken care of the infrastructure companies who maintain these datacenters.

Some of the advantages of the cloud computing are
* Cost effective and scalability for the business
* No hassle of installing and maintaining various softwares
* Data center can be located in a place where the electricity and real estate prices are less
* Can access the business applications from any part of the world and through hand held devices

On the flip side there are concerns that some companies are raising about the security of critical datas stored in the centralized datacenters.A country's defence information cannot be stored or maintained in datacenter which is located in the another country.
The infrastructure organizations are working to address the above concerns.

The leading companies that provide cloud computing services are Amazon, Google, and IBM. The perfect example of cloud computing is the google doc applications which can be accessible through web.Cloud computing provides a major challenge for the proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Sap etc as they make softwares for PC.Of late microsoft has also started providing applications through the web to compete with google and other emerging companies.

I read in an article that Newyork times has used Amazon's cloud computing services to digitally archive their articles from 1851 to 1980.They call it as "Times Machine".So now the readers could access the pdf files of the archived articles and enjoy it.Newyork times has announced that it might took so much of money and years(they said about 10 to 20years) to implement it on thier own since they had to improve their existing infrastructure to support these powerful applications.As Amazon has already got these infrastructure newyork times enbraced it and implemented it in no time.Now you could understand the effectiveness of the cloud computing.

On whole cloud computing can be defined as a combination of Software as Service (SaaS) and Hardware as Service (HaaS).

I am sure you would have enjoyed my blog post and Thanks for reading it.

Kathir