Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. "During the past 15 years, a continuing trend toward IT industrialization has grown in popularity as IT services delivered via hardware, software and people are becoming repeatable and usable by a wide range of customers and service providers," said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner Fellow. "This is due, in part to the commoditization and standardization of technologies, in part to virtualization and the rise of service-oriented software architectures, and most importantly, to the dramatic growth in popularity of the Internet." How It Works With Cloud Hosting companies are able to host robust applications and other IT services so they can be deployed and scaled rapidly. Cloud Providers achieve this by investing in a large, hosting infrastructure and using virtualization to divide this infrastructure up between different customers and services. This environment allows individual users to be able to easily scale up to higher capacities when needed. Most allow for on-demand access to CPU processing power without the need for shutting down user access to upgrade capacity. A Cloud Infrastructure virtualizes large-scale compute resources and packages them up into smaller quantities Cloud Computing is characterized by several common qualities: It's scalable: Each customer's application has access to almost limitless resources (CPU, Memory, Storage) and can use as little or as much as they need; It's shared: Cloud Computing Providers can use a large, common infrastructure for many applications or customers; It's cost efficient: By adopting a single standard, inexpensive infrastructure and taking advantage of economies of scale, costs can be controlled and utilization maximised; It's a flexible environment: In most cases, a customer can run their application on an on-premise (private) cloud, on off-premise (public) cloud, and can move it between clouds as conditions dictate. Hosting Providers are developing cloud-based infrastructures to obtain better ROI from their infrastructure investments, to control costs by investing in commodity, general-purpose hardware (rather than single-purpose proprietary hardware), and to take advantage of the capabilities that technologies like virtualization and large economies of scale brings. www.zeus.com

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