Cloud Computing — What is it?  Its basically the way most computing is going to be done in the near future.  Instead of buying and managing computers, people and businesses will use a cloud service to provide them the computing resources they need.  Since its a service, you can add or subtract what resources you need and only pay for what you use. You can think of cloud computing as you would electricity from the power company. You pay for what you use.
For example, say a small business needs 5 desktops computers and one server.  A single desktop averages about $1000 and a server $4000.  So this small business needs to fork out $9000 just to get started.  That price doesn’t include all the security patching, Anti-virus and overall management of those systems—not to mention the cost to power them all.  Cloud computing would allow the small business to defer those costs and only pay a service fee for the computing resources they need.  It is a much more affordable solution.

Posted via email from Al’s posterous