What is The Cloud?

The Cloud simply refers to services that are provided via the Internet.  Alot of these services have been around as long as the Internet has - but as Internet connections become faster and more reliable, it becomes more and more feasible to move local IT systems to an external provider.  This can cut down costs and outsource complexity to specialist companies.

Companies like Amazon who have huge data processing facilities now make good money from renting out processing time and space.  This goes back to the old days where everything was run on the company mainframe and users requested timeslots to run their programs.

The most familiar service in The Cloud would be email.  If you don't have your own mail server - then your email is in The Cloud.  This used to be how it was for everyone, with only large organisations having their own internal mail server.  However, as server costs have dropped and broadband connections have become more reliable, businesses of all sizes have seen the benefits of having their own in-house email solution.  In the last few years, there's been some movement back to the old ways of using hosted email as the services offered become more feature rich.  There are pros and cons to moving your email to The Cloud - have a look at the Email Services page for more details.

Other services that you might find in The Cloud are hosted management systems, either specific to certain industries or for use by any type of business e.g. SalesForce.com.   These types of services are fairly new.  The most common Cloud service that companies take advantage of is web hosting - in fact, very few companies will do this in-house due to speed and security concerns.

So you see, The Cloud has been around for some time...but someone in marketing saw the opportunity to coin a new phrase.