The fundamentals of cloud computing are not to hard to learn and the terminology has recieved considerable attention over the last couple of years. Cloud computing is simply outsouring your infrastructure or software services to someone else. The company that will be responsible for providing the cloud service to your oganization will manage the service in their own data center. This will help you recieve all the benefits of the service without the headaches that are inolved in managing the service.

3 types of cloud services
Cloud computing can be divided into 3 main types of services that are offered to consumers which are:

Infrastructure as a service - This is when vendors offer hardware hosting services to your organization. For example, if you would like to save your data on a server that requires at least a 5GB hard drive then the cloud provider can provide you the server to meet this requirement at their data center. They will provide you with a way to save your file over the internet onto their server remotely.

Platform as a service - This is when vendors provide a platform on their infrastructure to allow companies to build their own code, web page, web form, report that is tailored specifically to their organization. The vendor will provide the framework and code base to allow companies to build their own software products using the vendor's tools. An example of a platform as a service provider in the cloud industry is Salesforce.com.

Software as a service - This is when vendors offer their software to your company but instead of the software installed on to your servers, the software will be hosted at the vendor's data center. This will provide companies with the advantage of getting the software they want and just paying for the licence required to set up a user account with the software vendor.