Frequently Asked Questions

What are some examples of cloud computing today?

Some high profile examples of the cloud are applications such as salesforce.com, Google Docs or Microsoft’s Hotmail/Live service. These applications have been built for a cloud computing architecture enabling seamless scalability- allowing new resources to be “bolted on” as demand increases, and with high levels resiliency – the loss of a single server or even whole data centre may not affect the applications availability as the load is spread across resources in many locations.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a term used to describe a highly scalable pool of computing resources provided as a service and can be physically located within either one or many geographical locations. At a high level, cloud computing is made up of three components;

• Infrastructure - processing capacity, data storage and network services;
• Platform - an application framework such as a clustering technology or automated resource allocation systems; and
• Application - the website, business application or database (amount others) utilising the cloud infrastructure and platform