A 30 second guide to cloud computing

A nebulous term, if you ll excuse the pun, from the world of high tech. It s about making computing services a commodity, which companies and consumers can at the time access over the internet.

Think of electricity. In days gone by factory owners would have had to generate their own power to drive their production lines. Nevertheless with the advent of national grids, they could simply buy the electricity they required without the cost and hassle of building power generators. With high-speed internet access however ubiquitous, this is the direction the IT industry is nevertheless taking.

Tech giants just as IBM and Amazon are increasingly selling computing services from centralised data centres. These cloud services can at the time run on any device that connects to the internet. Because the centralised computers are doing all the heavy lifting it means companies don t have to buy expensive desktop computers for their staff.

The price of IT for business

Cloud computing should drive down the price of IT for business and governments. According to the Centre for Economics and Business Innovation, the cloud could give the European Union economies a £650bn boost by 2016 and create some 2.4m jobs. - Daily Mail