While i was checking my Gmail account,a folk caught me on chat asking about one of the articles on TechPluto.He was interested in knowing more about ‘Microsoft’s Cloud computing services’ and what actually are they going to provide under their latest venture.

But soon i realised that the guy had some wrong notions about “Cloud Computing”.And i think,it’s not just him but many others who’re still not able to interpret the word “Cloud computing” in correct sense.

And even various sources on internet describe “Cloud Computing” in their own way.In general,Cloud computing is described a concept through which the customer gets billed only for the duration and the extent to which that customer uses the web services(mostly ’servers’) rather than paying a fixed rental for a service(servers).

But actually the above description is known as “Utility Computing”.“Cloud computing” is often confused with another concept called “Grid Computing” which is basically a large collection of small scale computers,connected to each other in a grid format to collaboratively work as a ‘Supercomputer’ with exceptional processing capabilities.

‘Utility computing’ and ‘Grid computing’ have been there for years now but the buzzword “Cloud computing” is relatively new.

Here ‘Cloud’ depicts ‘Internet’ and ‘Computing’ means ‘use of computer technology for task execution’.As ‘Cloud Computing’,it means “When the task execution requiring computers is based on internet” rather than your PC and the respective softwares installed on it.

Your entire data and all the services are hosted on high capacity servers and you get to access the data & services whenever you want through Internet(or Cloud).That’s why cloud computing is also referred to as “On demand computing”.

In simple words,when most of your computational needs do not require your own IT infrastructure but just an access point(Internet) through which you get to use/access all those data & softwares services(SaaS,Software as a Service) based on your timely requirements is referred to as Cloud Computing.

For instance,if you are using Google Apps(say Google Docs to create docs,spreadsheets online),then you don’t require MS Office at your system.You just require an access point which is ‘internet’(Cloud) to access the service(actually a Software-as-a-Service called SaaS).So,this is how your computing becomes web based and PC independent.That’s the main concept of Cloud Computing.

Hence ‘Cloud computing’ is a superset to ‘Utility Computing’ & ‘Grid Computing’.And this is what Microsoft is gearing up to offer.

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