As Entrepreneurs, weâre increasingly hearing that cloud computing can benefit our businesses; but what is the âcloudâ and how exactly does it work? The fact is that youâve probably been using cloud computing for years, perhaps without realizing it. If you have a Hotmail email account, use Facebook, or do your banking online, youâre utilizing the cloud.
The cloud simply means applications and services that people access via the internet instead of installing software on their own computers. If youâre online, youâre somewhere in the cloud. The reason for so much discussion about these services lately is that, over recent years and months, many valuable services that once required installing applications have become available as cloud services. Often, businesses can use free versions of these applications in the cloud, while full-featured versions are available at low subscription rates.
For example, Microsoftâs recently released Office 2010 contains free and subscription-based cloud versions of its popular business applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Through the cloud, these documents can be accessed anywhere via PCs, browsers or mobile devices. Similarly, Googleâs Gmail and Google Docs operate in the cloud
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