What is Cloud Computing?
There’s a good chance you’ve already used some form of cloud computing. If you have an e-mail account with a Web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, then you’ve had some experience of cloud computing. With Web email, instead of running an email program on your computer, you log in to your account remotely. The software that you are accessing to drive your online email account and the storage of the information held within it, doesn’t live on your computer – it’s stored on your email providers computer. Zoho’s suite of online business Apps, for example, are hosted in the ‘cloud’. In reality what that means is, they actually run on highly secure server machines in the USA and Asia and other parts of the world and that infrastructure is maintained by Zoho.
This allows you to focus on your business, not on IT issues. Infrastructure maintenance includes hardware, software, security, backups, emergency power supplies, disaster recovery, upgrades and patches. All you need to access and use your online business apps is a PC, laptop, tablet or even a mobile phone – and an internet connection.
Gone are the headaches and expenses involved in keeping your IT infrastructure up-to-date. Now, your data is accessible from anywhere at anytime, meaning you can access it from the office, at home, or on the train! All your data and your software exists in the ‘cloud’ and is there at all times for you to readily access.