Cloud computing is nothing new; the term "cloud" is just a marketing gimmick, the cloud representing the public internet. It is basically renting computing power, storage, and applications from a vendor that hosts all of the necessary hardware, software, and infrastructure for you, rather than having to buy and maintain it yourself. You pay a relatively small monthly fee to a cloud provider, and then you access your applications and data over the internet. They take care of all the back-end "technical stuff" for you, and usually provide you with an easy-to-use/understand control panel that allows you to manage your services/subscription.

It's a way for businesses to save money by renting software as a service or utility, rather than having to buy and maintain servers themselves. For a small business, this can help them get up and running with a reliable, powerful computing infrastructure for relatively low cash outlay.

The danger in cloud computing is the fact that all your important, critical data is being kept and maintained by a company in which you do not own and do not control, by people you do not know and trust, very possibly in a jurisdiction in which you or your business does not reside. In addition, once your business is fully dependent on the computing services that the cloud offers, the price will likely go up (way up), and it will be likely very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to "jump off the cloud" and into your own, local computing systems. Lastly, you never really know what government, competitor, or hacker is looking at or modifying your data, which again, is likely stored or replicated far out of your sight or reach.

Best,

Hill

It's the inevitable future we all hate! ...

I agree with @YesuWangu on this one. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a much better alternative to cloud computing if you want to have more control over your data. It gives you the best of both worlds. Low cost and autonomy. Most FOSS solutions are immensely configurable and place relatively few restrictions on what you can do with them.

Thank you Mr. Seppuku for reminding me of that all-important word I did not mention - free.

It makes the difference, that 4 letter word.

I should add that there are free and open source software (FOSS) that have crossed into cloud computing. Especially in storage. But a selling point to the end consumers of cloud computing is that one does not need to install software, whether free or not, for preparing office documents into his quad core computer. So in effect one does not really need the quad core hardware when one can get the cloud.

Which exposes the under belly of the system - relying on too long a chain to get even the simplest of tasks done. One will need his ISP not to let him down to get his cloud computing done. That is one extra link that is too long.

So yes, Mr. bird_man, the 300gb disk, with all the required software installed (free while at it) still has use. Make that plenty of use, for the simple guys like yours truly who prefer not to leave the fingerprints of all their ten fingers all over the internet everyday.

The challenge of security and outages you have mentioned still stands. No cost and autonomy?

But back to the original posters' question, how can cloud computing improve business......yes it will, a million times over.

Outsourcing your work to the geeks and nerds (maximum respect to you guys) behind the clouds who just happen to be firing their top-of-the-range quad cores on all cylinders will definitely and without question improve their business.

But to each his own.

I agree with the bird_man... An example of cloud computing is google docs which is free. With time open source cloud computing will catch up (though I don't know how much I'd trust critical company data to persons that I know nothing of offering their services for free)