What is it?  You probably have heard all the advertising and banting around of the term, but what value is it to you?  Why should you care?  Well, for one, cloud computing is not an “epiphany”.  It is something the industry has been trying to deliver in a cost effective way for years.

It is this – delivering everything you need as an end user (infrastructure, platform and software) as a web service.  That is  it in a nutshell.
But here’s the tricky part – how to know what you need when you need it?  There is  the wide open field that companies are racing to fill.

The “cloud” in this case, is the Internet as we know it.  The users are you and me, and we are delivered the services we need over the “cloud” on a per use fee basis, or a subscription.  We aren’t required to invest in the infrastructure (hardware and software) to deliver these services, rather we “pay as we go”,  kind of like how utilities are delivered.  By utilizing this type of delivery, the companies who are delivering can get greater utilization out of their hardware and software, and spread the costs of the services across more recipients. 

In the old days, we considered this type of delivery and labeled it “time sharing”.  Telephone companies did it early on with Virtual Private Networks.  In a recent article by Nicholas Carr, he likened this paradigm shift in the IT evolution as similar to the displacement of the electrical generators by the electric grid in the early 20th century.  But, I digress.

Not only is this type of service more effective, it can also provide side effects like the reduction of CO2 by reducing energy required to deliver the service.  If more companies utilize cloud computing as a service approach and fewer companies are at the hub of the cloud services, we potentially get greater service levels, and are happier people.

Now isn’t that what we want…to be happy?  Go figure.