Cloud computing is being acclaimed as the penultimate
solution to the problems of uncertain traffic spikes, computing
overloads, and potentially expensive investments in hardware for data processing and backups.
It can potentially transform the IT industry, making both software and infrastructure even more attractive as services, by reshaping the way hardware is designed and purchased. In practice, cloud computing is a computing paradigm to supplement the current consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, by providing for dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources over the Internet.
The cloud computing paradigm is not new and can be thought of as an extension of how we use the Internet. In fact, the term cloud is also used to represent the Internet. The main idea of cloud computing is to outsource the management and delivery of software and hardware resources to third-party companies (cloud providers), which specialize in that particular service and can provide much better quality of service at lower costs in a convenient fashion.