For all those who keep themselves up with the latest developments in the ever-expanding universe of the Internet, whether out of recreation or profession, escaping the buzz about cloud computing must have seemed an impossibility. Since last year, Cloud Computing has been a buzz word in the technology world both digital and print.  

Out of the ocean of information about cloud computing available online and in print, we tried to glean the best information and present it to our readers in the simplest form possible to help them understand the term better. Below is the information about cloud computing, made possible by putting several information pieces together for our readers.

An article titled Today’s Forecast: Cloudy published in Newsweek’s Nov 1, 2008 issue introduced Cloud Computing in a simple and easily understandable way. The article told that what was earlier called ‘On-Demand Computing’ by IBM and ‘Grid Computing’ and ‘Software as a Service’ by others, had ultimately evolved to become ‘Cloud Computing’ which is “the hot new dance craze—er, tech trend—that's sweeping the compting industry.” The basic idea of cloud computing makes real sense: Store all your data not on your PC but on a server on the Internet. It’s as simple as it sounds./p>

Cloud computing sets you free of such hassles as remembering whether you left your expense-report spreadsheet on the PC at work or the MacBook at home. It’ll also rid you of the frequent trouble of backing up all your data, transferring it from one device to another fearing a defunct hard drive. Neither would you be wasting your time copying all your stuff from the old to the new PC once you have moved to cloud computing. “It also means you can create a repository of information that stays with you and keeps growing for as long as you're alive,” says the Newsweek article.

Another plus of cloud is that you wouldn’t need to know or care where all your data is lying and where the servers are located. It’s very much possible for all your data to be scattered across a bunch of servers present at different locations. Just think it this way that all your stuff is somewhere up in the sky (or a cloud), is perfectly safe, and accessible from anywhere at any point of time. “As long as you're connected to the Internet, with enough bandwidth, you can get at your photos and documents and home movies from wherever you happen to be, using any device you want, such as your mobile phone, a laptop, a media player or an Internet kiosk at the airport.” About the novel concept of cloud computing, Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware said, "People are going to put their information not into some device, but into some service that lives in the sky."

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Who is offering cloud services? In a preceding Newsweek article titled Living in the Clouds, author Brian Braiker tells the reader, “If you thought Amazon sold only books, you probably think Google is just a search engine. Both Amazon and Google—along with Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Yahoo and other small players—have just started rolling out cloud computing services.” Some examples of cloud computing in its crude form are Apple’s ‘Mobile Me’ (keeps my calendar, address book and bookmarks synchronized on my iMac, MacBook Pro and iPhone) and Amazon’s ‘Web Services’ (renting out computing power and storage space to 440,000 developers, with more than 30,000 more signing up each quarter). Other such online storage services include AOL’s Xdrive and Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive.

The leading tech giant Google has been spearheading the virtualization revolution. “Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations,” says a technologyreview.com article titled Google’s Cloud Looms Large, published way back in Dec 2007. Before that, a Wall Street Journal article had reported that Google was planning to launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire hard drives online. (Google didn't acknowledge the existence of such a service.)

The idea of cloud computing is quite appealing for companies who can choose to rent computing power and storage rather than maintaining their own data centers. Renting a cloud service means you pay only for what you use, much like electricity. Some companies have already started to use Amazon for running new applications instead of adding them on their data centers. These include Eli Lilly, The New York Times and National Geographic. In May 2008, New York Times provided free, fully searchable access to its 1851 to 1922 archive called TimesMachine—more than 15 million articles without using a byte of its own processing power subscribing to Amazon’s cloud service. Besides ridding you of data management hassles, a switch to cloud might also cut companies’ computing costs in half. According to estimates, spending on cloud computing will boom from $16 billion in 2008 to $42 billion in 2012.