Question

i am a complete noob to cloud computing. i read that cloud computing means storing data on a remote server rather than to store it on our hard drive. And then accessing this data whenever required.
I can also store my data upto 10GB in yahoo or gmail. Then are these email facilities also considered as a part of cloud? If not, then what is the difference?

Answer 1

Yes, these service do count as part of a Cloud. They belong to family of Cloud services called “Software as a Service (SaaS)”, cause you get complete a complete software solution (in your case – email) from the cloud (which is “cloud” of remote computers somewhere over the Internet).

There are many types of cloud services. For example:

• Infrastructure as a service: you get pure computing power – CPU cycles, Memory…
• Platform as a service: you get application platform for deploying your own applications on top of it, for example the JavaEE platform.
• Software as a service: you get a complete software solution, like Email.

The common properties for all above are:

• They are provided to you as a service by some third party over the Internet;
• Scalebility, meaning it suits your needs whether they’re small or big;

More about this topic is nicely summarized in Wikipedia.