

What the Heck Is Cloud Computing? - psogle
http://www.focus.com/articles/servers-storage/what-heck-cloud-computing/

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BrentRitterbeck
Please forgive my ignorance, but I still don't understand how this could live
up to everything the article says it could do. I am specifically referring to
the part of the article that mentions MS Office.

I use Excel heavily when I am working with financial data from 10Ks and 10Qs.
I've tried other services that are competitors of Excel, but only the Open
Office version comes close to having the same functionality, and I usually
don't even need the more advanced features of Excel. Will the cloud (correct
term?) eventually be able to offer the full functionality of Excel?

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pthatcher
Google Docs is constantly improving and have built up much of the basic
functionality of excel but it will be a little while before it can really
match feature for feature.

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speek
It's computing with multiple data centers...

You can have a local cloud (a data center that you're in) and an external
cloud (an undisclosed number of data centers that are external to you)... but
whenever you abstract the number of external data centers, that becomes a
cloud.

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tybris
Lets just say it's the union of IaaS, RaaS and SaaS.

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kierank
The term "Cloud computing" has been abused quite heavily but here's how I
understand it:

Your use of an external service where your use of that service (e.g. storage,
processing power etc.) is so small compared to the global use that you are
able to scale up and down without affecting anyone and the system as a whole.
You also only pay for the amounts of the service that you have used.

