Ask a handful of IT consultants to explain the cloud, and you’ll likely be met with a blizzard of buzzwords—”scalability,”“elasticity,” and “hybrid infrastructure”—that do very little to help you hit your quarterly goals.
All the noise aside, the cloud isn’t a mystery; it’s simply renting someone else's computer. Instead of maintaining a server box in your broom closet, you are leasing space on high-performance machines owned by giants like Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. They own the hardware; you own the results.