If you’ve been paying any attention to current IT trends over the past few years, there is no doubt you’ve heard the term “cloud computing”. There is also no doubt that it’s one of the hottest IT buzzwords floating around out there, today. But what exactly is the cloud, and what are some of the advantages, and precautions, your business should take when evaluating whether to use cloud computing?
To put it simply, cloud computing is using a cluster of resources that may or may not be local to your IT infrastructure to perform IT functions on demand. Think of it this way – in the past, many companies had dedicated servers that performed certain functions, such as financial backend processing to a project. Companies had to plan for peak usage, redundancy, growth, etc. This usually meant that companies were investing large amounts of money in IT infrastructure, that could sit idle for long periods of time.
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