What the heck is "The Cloud" ?

The term "The Cloud" can mean various things. but the simplest definition is it's services that traditionally you might have had in house hosted on servers in datacentres and accessed via the Internet. The Cloud is nothing new as for years we've all been using cloud services when we view web pages as these servers are generally hosted in data centres and not on premesis.

What is different is that the service is being extended beyond just web servers. Tradtionally business have had servers on site running their file storage and mail services. By moving these services into the cloud there are significant cost savings to be made as no server hardware is required. In addition there are advantages for disaster recovery scenarios as businesses no longer need to worry about security of data in house. Having your data in the cloud allows you to work from anywhere there is an Internet connection and a device to access it.