The easiest way to describe ‘cloud computing’, known simply as the cloud is to compare it to the electricity grid whereby the end user (subscriber), in this example for electricity, has electricity piped into their home without needing to understand anything about the technology or infrastructure which meant they could switch on their lights.

Cloud computing contains services offered similar to those that would normally require a physical software or even hardware installation by a user to start using it, as well as needing some technical understanding to set it up. With services operating in the ‘cloud’ many different options can be offered from storing documents and files to enhanced business services.

Most services usually require a simple registration for the service and access is made using a normal Internet browser or mobile application, allowing the user to utilise a huge amount of computing power without bogging down their own device.

One company that has been referring to the cloud (iCloud) is Apple as they are now offering a range of services and features in the iCloud such as iTunes.

What does this mean?

Taking iTunes as an example it means that the storage of all your music is stored securely in the iCloud. The benefit of this is that it will then be available to all of your Apple devices as they all just access the content in the iCloud.

In fact with iCloud all of your emails and contacts can be shared between your devices without the former and more time consuming method of ‘synching’ (synchronising the devices via a cable or application).

The cloud has been around much longer than iCloud though and there are far more services that are on offer. In fact Google were very much involved with one of the first major ‘cloud’ services namely Salesforce.

Salesforce was an extremely powerful Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM), something that would have cost individual clients a small fortune to set up. Even many ‘off the shelf’ products had a fraction of the features offered by Salesforce, which operated on a per user license subscription method. It was also one of the first major Internet products to offer ‘apps’. These were third party built applications to integrate Salesforce into many different services like accounting and invoicing to management of paid search campaigns on Google.

As we start to leave our laptops at home when we travel and instead rely on our smartphones while on the move, the cloud is going to become more popular and many services will start to be offered via the cloud to allow sharing of information between your devices.