What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centers, companies can rent access to anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider. This helps to lower operating costs, run infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as a business’s needs change.

Key characteristics of cloud computing include:

1. On-demand self-service: Users can provision resources as needed without requiring human interaction with the service provider.
2. Broad network access: Services are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).
3. Resource pooling: The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand.
4. Rapid elasticity: Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the user, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
5. Measured service: Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth