The term Cloud computing means providing the computing services like databases, software, storage, servers, analytics and many more through the Internet (the Cloud). The word Cloud is just a symbol for Internet in Computer Science. It is the practice of using Internet to store, retrieve, manage and process data. Companies that offer these computing services are called Cloud Providers and they charge for their services. The users pay according to their usage like someone pay for their electricity or mobile bills.

When someone store or use data on and run programs from the hard drive of their own local device it is called local storage or computing. But when someone uses internet to store and access data and programs it is cloud computing.

The initial idea of time sharing was came in 1960’s through RJE (Remote Job Entry). This part-time sharing was converted to full time-sharing solutions in early 1970’s. In 1990’s the point to point data circuits provided by telecommunication companies were converted to VPN (Virtual Private Network) with better quality at low cost. In 1996 cloud computing came in its present and modern perception. Since then cloud computing is stretching out and covered all the servers and networks. Almost all service providing companies like IBM, Amazon, NASA, Oracle, Google have their own clouds and compute engines.

On companies part, it also eliminates the need of large investments in infrastructures.

Flexibility - Companies can expand and release their infrastructural resources depending upon the increase and decrease in demand of computing needs. This gives the ability to scale up the resources.

Ease of use - Consumer or end user can manage the interested data on his own. Now there is no need for any IT administrator for managing compute resources.

Reliability – Through cloud computing, maintenance and recovery of data becomes easier and cheaper because of the centralization of data.

Independence from device and location bounds- Now user can enjoy full independence as he can can access any data from any device (like mobile, PC) and from any location.

Speed- All the data that a person need is just at the distance of few mouse clicks. 

Performance- The information which we find on the internet is consistent, reliable and up to date.

Productivity- Since multiple users can work on same data at same time, without any delays, the production will be increased. 

Resource pooling- The providers can pool computing resources to fulfill the consumer demands from different sources. Even the organizations can share the data on different cloud platforms so that new services can emerge.

- Large data storage 

- Online data analysis

- Backup of data and resources

- Recovery from any disaster

- Ready made work environment

- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

- Platform as a service (PaaS)

- Software as a service (SaaS)

- Security as a service (SECaaS)