What is the computer term 'The Cloud'?

-What is the computer term 'The Cloud' and why is it so good?It references certain companies that store data over the interent. For example, Google Docs uses "a cloud" to store its information. It can only be accessed if you are connected to the interent. The information isn't actually stored in a cloud, but the many company's buildings that hold the information. Another example is soon to come out, Apple's cloud. Go to its website to see more. Cisco is a company that does cloud storage for other people/company.It's a general concept where a service provider provides some kind of service and the finer details of how it is implemented are not the concern of the user, in fact they can't usually even determine many of them even if they are interested. So for example, we may talk about a network cloud - you don't know about the individual links, switches and routers that make up that network, you just know that if you send a properly addressed packet into the cloud at one point it will re-emerge from the cloud at the destination. It is the service provider that has the job of monitoring utilisation, installing extra capacity, and managing equipment failures: those details are largely invisible to you as a customer.



Current marketing speak tends to use it to mean hosted application platforms. This could mean a virtual system running on a machine owned by the service provider and running your operating and applications, or it may mean an individual service that is contracted out to an external provider to provide - email servers and databases are common examples. In these cases you know little about the physical location of the servers, the kind of hardware they are run on, or even how your server may be switched from machine to machine to allow for hardware upgrades, equipment failures and so on. All you see is the remote machine or service and are able to make use of it - the low level details are not your concern and managed by the provider.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_compu鈥?/a>



without a cloud, a web server runs as a single computer click the link and read about it