cloud computing

Provides users access to IT-related capabilities (infrastructure and/or applications) "as a service" without regard for the underlying technology or physical hardware. Inherent in this solution is a high level of resiliency and variable capacity.

Cloud computing is a broader concept than utility computing and relates to the underlying architecture in which the services are designed. It may be applied equally to utility services and internal corporate data centers, as George Gilder reported in a story for Wired Magazine titled The Information Factories. Wall Street firms have been implementing internal clouds for years. They call it "grid computing," but the concepts are the same.

Although it is difficult to come up with a precise and comprehensive definition of cloud computing, at the heart of it is the idea that applications run somewhere on the "cloud" (whether an internal corporate network or the public Internet) - we don't know or care where. But as end users, that's not big news: We've been using web applications for years without any concern as to where the applications actually run.

The big news is for application developers and IT operations. Done right, cloud computing allows them to develop, deploy and run applications that can easily grow capacity (scalability), work fast (performance), and never - or at least rarely - fail (reliability), all without any concern as to the nature and location of the underlying infrastructure.