A nebulous term, if you ll excuse the pun, from the world of high tech. It s about making computing services a commodity, which companies and consumers can then access over the internet.
Think of electricity. In days gone by factory owners would have had to generate their own power to drive their production lines. But with the advent of national grids, they could simply buy the electricity they required without the cost and hassle of building power generators. With high-speed internet access now ubiquitous, this is the direction the IT industry is now taking.
Tech giants such as IBM and Amazon are increasingly selling computing services from centralised data centres. These cloud services can then run on any device that connects to the internet. Because the centralised computers are doing all the heavy lifting it means companies don t have to buy expensive desktop computers for their staff.
Cloud computing should drive down the price of IT for business and governments. According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, the cloud could give the European Union economies a £650bn boost by 2016 and create some 2.4m jobs. - Daily Mail