As a small business manager you don’t need to know all the in’s and out’s of cloud computing.
You were probably just getting used to terms like application service provider (ASP), hosted application, on-line application and software as a service (SaaS) when along comes the term “cloud.”
A picture of a “cloud” to represent the Internet has been used in diagrams for years and is akin to the term “black box.” The underlying concept is the same for all the above terms—your application processing and/or data reside outside of your company.
What is different about the term “cloud” compared to the other terms listed above is that it has become associated with technology advancements like virtualization that have made the ability to run services on the Internet more efficiently and add additional computing resources more dynamically. Internet-based applications or services are taking advantage of these efficiencies which means that your data already on the Internet may be in the cloud.
Additional Information
Source: Wikipedia
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