Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a model of delivering computing resources, such as processing power, storage and software, over the internet on demand, from data centers a customer does not own or manage, rather than from equipment installed locally. Its underlying idea traces back to the time-sharing systems of the 1960s, when computer scientists such as John McCarthy envisioned computing power being sold to the public the way electricity or water is, but the term and the modern commercial model took shape only once internet bandwidth and virtualization matured; Amazon Web Services' launch of its Elastic Compute Cloud service in 2006 is widely credited with establishing the pay-as-you-go public cloud as a mainstream commercial offering. Google and Microsoft followed with their own large-scale cloud platforms soon after, and cloud computing has since become the standard way most organizations run web applications, store data and access computing capacity without buying and maintaining their own servers.