An IT Minute

Cloud computing is in the news a lot lately: AT&T,  Amazon, IBM, etc have invested heavily in this technology. 

Here's a definition:

As customers generally do not own the infrastructure, they are merely accessing or renting, they can forego capital expenditure and consume resources as a service, paying instead for what they use. Many cloud computing offerings have adopted the utility computing model which is analogous to how traditional utilities like electricity are consumed, while others are billed on a subscription basis. By sharing "perishable and intangible" computing power between multiple tenants, utilization rates can be improved (as servers are not left idle) which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development. A side effect of this approach is that "computer capacity rises dramatically" as customers do not have to engineer for peak loads. Adoption has been enabled by "increased high-speed bandwidth" which makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.

Takeaway:

Being cloud happy could save your organization a lot on the bottom line and help the environment at the same time as you reduce your IT infrastructure footprint.