What is Cloud?

Cloud computing is based on the use of Internet technologies. This is a collection of independent standards that govern the way the World Wide Web operates. In particular, for the end user this is all about how you access the Internet using a web browser application such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari.

The latest versions of browsers have reached the point where they can run an application with almost all the features and speed of a normal desktop application. A good example of this is the latest versions of Microsoft Outlook, the desktop application for accessing your email, and Microsoft Web Access which is the same thing but used to access your email over the Internet using a browser.

Browsers access a web server. The web server can be anywhere, including on your own premises. This would typically be the case for Outlook Web Access which will be provided as a web based application running on your in-house email server. Note that the data created or received by the application is also stored on the web server.

Using Internet technologies standardises the means of access, a web browser, and requires virtually no special set up or configuration of the users device, wherever located. This standardisation means that it is just as easy to locate the server in a dedicated data centre as it is to house it on your own premises.

Housing the server in a data centre makes it part of an installation dedicated to its purpose and supported by a few, highly skilled staff. This means that back ups, high availability configurations and general management are done to the highest level while at the same time it is in the interests of the data centre to use highly power efficient designs. With the number of servers that a data centre contains power saving is critical as this has a direct impact on the cost of running the centre.

This is leading to the use of applications written specifically to run in this environment and the user does not even need to know the physical location of the data centre as long as they have an Internet connection. Hence the term that the application is running in the Internet Cloud.