Posted 01/27/09 at 02:30:11 PM by Michael Brown

If a computer can exist without hardware, as we learned in last month’s white paper about virtual machines, can it be useful without application software? It can if it relies on the concept of cloud computing.

Cloud computing describes a data-processing infrastructure in which the application software—and often the data itself—is stored permanently not on your PC but rather a remote server that’s connected to the Internet. When you need to use the application or access the data, your computer connects to the server through the Internet and some of that information is cached temporarily on your client machine. What do clouds have to do with all this? The cloud is simply a metaphor for the Internet, based on the symbol that’s used to represent the worldwide network in computer network diagrams.

Read on to find out more about cloud computing!

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