Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is one of the newest internet trends that has taken hold of not only the business world but, also the personal at-home user. At it's core, Cloud Computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the internet instead of your physical computer.

Cloud is just a metaphor for the internet which brings back images of the old flow charts and network diagrams where the internet is represented by a picture of a cloud. Could Computing has some great benefits. Some of which are the fact that you do not have to carry around a certain computer with you to access your information and programs. Using Cloud Computing gives you the opportunity to have the same access regardless if you are at your own computer or at a public machine.

For the larger business uses there are also:

SaaS (software as a service) which is when a company subscribes to a application that is accessed over the internet.

PaaS (platform as a service) which is where a company creates it's own applications for use by the entire company.

IaaS (infrastructure as a service) which is where companies like Amazon and Google rent out a backbone to other companies.

Citrix, Salesforce, Google, and Amazon Web Services are some of the top cloud providers that are out there.

Citrix provides IaaS in the form of Cloud.com.

Salesforce provides SaaS in the form of enterprise-class CRM solutions.

Amazon provides IaaS in the form of public cloud computing worldwide and PaaS in the form of Elastic Beanstalk.

Google provides PaaS as they have multiple in-house applications that their workforce uses to streamline and engineer some of the best cloud services (Gmail, Google Drive, etc..) that are available.

There are some large companies and even startups that have taken to Cloud Computing in a big way.

InterContinental Hotels Group - This company has over 600,000 hotel rooms under seven brands, including Holiday Inn. They use Salesforce.com for their CRM and conducts much of its software development and testing on AWS Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure.

RehabCare Group - They are the third largest supplier of acute care rehabilitation services in the U.S. and they run their own custom-built software on the iPod Touch, which it delivers through Apple's App Store. The software is called Point of Care and it captures the time spent on a treatment and also captures details of the therapy, such as medicines and equipment used, along with related billings.

ServiceMax - This startup provides SaaS for managing field technicians. They use an iPad app as a front end that lets a user access ServiceMax's cloud-based functionality.

NVoicePay - This company wants to help small businesses automate invoice payments. They keep a small data center to hold sensitive customer information but, it relies on the Microsoft SQL Azure cloud platform for the rest of its computing horsepower, such as notifying parties of payments and updating their customer's accounting systems.

 All in all, Cloud Computing is a very cool emerging technology that is booming. It will be a very interesting topic to watch in the up-coming years.