Software as a Secure Service

Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC.

Cloud computing is an outgrowth of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.[1]

In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.[2] Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.[3][4]

The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents.[5] Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.

A technical definition is “a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”[6] This definition states that clouds have five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.[6] Narrowly speaking, cloud computing is client-server computing that abstract the details of the server away – one requests a service (resource), not a specific server (machine). However, cloud computing may be conflated with other terms, including client-server and utility computing, and the term has been criticized as vague and referring to “everything that we currently do”.[7][8][9]