Think about that road you drove on today.

You don't have to maintain and build that yourself.

It's there when you need it.

That's kind of how the cloud works.

The cloud, or cloud computing, is about you using bits and pieces of computers just like

this all over the world, but without having to own them and operate them in your own home.

You get to store your family photos, binge watch your favorite TV show, maybe even order

some new shoes, all without having to have this stuff running in your house.

Companies of all sizes like to leverage the cloud so that they can focus on their core

business and not have to maintain computers like this.

What they really like is the agility it gives them to adjust the computing demands based

on what's going on in their business today.

Think about a florist, for instance.

Those two weeks leading up to Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, they really need to

beef up their ability to do order processing.

The rest of the year, they don't need that and they certainly don't want to pay for it.

So, what does the florist do instead?

They leverage the cloud to put their compute needs out in a data center.

They've got room in their cooler now for that box of roses you just ordered instead of hosting

another server.

Why can we do this now when we couldn't do it 10 or 20 years ago?

It's because of high speed networks and the fact that we're all on the Internet.

You used to have to be right next to a computer for it to be usable and now, distance doesn't

matter.

Here's another thing to think about.

You ever play the cloud watching game?

You know, "I see a tree."

"No, over there, it's a bear!"

Everybody sees something a little bit different, don't they?

The nice thing about the cloud is, it's really whatever you need at any given time.

So how will you use the cloud next?

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