Trying to pin down exactly what cloud computing is, and what it is not, is about as easy as trying to pin down an actual cloud. At its broadest, “the cloud” is synonymous with “the internet”, but that non-definition is not much help to those struggling to sort the hot air and the hype from the reality.

A more useful approach is to think about cloud computing as “Everything as a Service”. Providing for your IT needs is increasingly not about buying stuff, it’s about buying the ability to do things. We all want, for example, to back up our data, to do it securely and reliably and to pay as little as possible for doing so. Exactly where those backups are stored, and how they are made is immaterial as long as they exist and we can get them when we need to. Nowadays, getting someone else to take care of it for us is a real alternative to going out and buying a set of tapes or a spare server.