Flying Into The Cloud Make Sure To Chart Your Course Very Carefully

The computer world always seems to develop creative and descriptive labels for new service offerings. 'cloud computing' is a recent service offering to emerge and be so labeled.

Think of a cloud as something that, while not solid, can't be seen into or through. This is a useful way to approach 'computing in the cloud'.

The consulting firm Gartner, Inc. defines cloud computing as "a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies".

In practical terms, cloud computing is a business model whereby a customer:

• contracts with a third party to store the customer's data on the third party's computer system, which could be located anywhere;