Cloud computing is the flavor of the moment in the technology industry. Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo are just some of the big companies touting the concept, and a bunch of smaller ones are, too.

What, you may be thinking, is cloud computing? Basically, it means obtaining computing resources — processing, storage, messaging, databases and so on — from someplace outside your own four walls, and paying only for what you use.

The term is a mushy one being applied loosely to many things on the Web. Salesforce.com is now called a cloud application — after all, companies let it store their sales documents, rather than running it on their own systems. Facebook, too, is a cloud platform, considering software developers write applications for the site and distribute them on it.

thereupon there is the infrastructure cloud, where companies offer up their servers, storage and other technology to anyone who can pay for it. Previously, that was

called grid or utility computing, considering you tapped into it as you needed it, as you would with the potential grid, and paid only for what you used. In the early days of computing, it was called time-sharing.

Thus, the concepts themselves are not new. “It’s true that we did not invent storage, databases, computers or database functionality,” said Andrew Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, a unit of Amazon.com that started in 2006 and was a pioneer in that new round of pay-as-you-go infrastructure services. Amazon, though, does not shout its cloud a cloud, except for one service called the Elastic Compute Cloud.

What looks to be new is the way high-speed World Wide Web access and nearly limitless supplies of storage and processing ability can now be pulled together.

A vivid example of cloud capability comes from Animoto, an 18-month-old company in New York that…

Original post by Top Tech News