I'm surprised in my talks with people, that many of them have heard the term cloud computing. I would almost venture to say (in my informal analysis) that more people have heard about cloud computing than Software as a Service or SaaS.
Cloud computing certainly is a good buzzword. I'd think we all at one point in our life lay on a lawn staring up at clouds trying to find shapes and animals in the sky.
Clouds tend to evoke happy feelings of nature and childhood. What is ironic is that the computing cloud lies within data centers that now consume more electricity annually than Sweden--not exactly nature-like. And these data centers are tightly regulated and secured--not exactly child friendly.
Now cloud computing or SaaS does have many benefits especially for small businesses. When you run you applications on servers in data centers (aka the cloud) you are given access to very powerful computers as well as fast internet connections. For the price, a small business would not get the same power with a server running in the office.
Another one of the benefits of running applications in the cloud is that small businesses no longer need to worry about a server breaking. In the cloud, the servers are all maintained by professionals.
Certainly cloud computing is not the best fit for every small business, but it is definitely worth taking a look at as a way to reduce IT costs and the hassle of running your own servers.
The New York Times has a very interesting article about the data centers that run the cloud. If nothing else checkout the slideshow of great pictures that take you inside some of the nation's largest data centers.
