Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a relatively new term introduced in the past year and the term cloud computing comes from the use of a cloud image to represent the Internet or some large networked environment. It means different things to different IT professionals and to different institutions. This new type of industry joins the ranks of terms including: grid computing, utility computing, virtualization, clustering, etc. Cloud computing is now associated with a higher level abstraction of the cloud. Instead of there being data pipes, routers and servers, there are now services. Cloud computing is often used to loosely describe a broad range of activities, ranging from outsourcing a specific activity to a single external provider to delivering a set of services from the cloud in such a way that users are not even sure where their data is being housed or where it is being processed. Cloud services offer higher education and research institutions the power to choose: the opportunity to rethink which services are needed to support education and research and what will be the best way to deliver those services. Behind the services are data and compute resources. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used or how it’s managed. Only that there is access to it and has a level of reliability necessary to meet the application requirements.

So, cloud computing is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. Cloud manages multiple infrastructures across multiple organizations and consists of more than one frameworks overlaid on top of the infrastructures tying them together.