Cloud Technologies
Many businesses are looking at "The Cloud" for efficiencies in operating the applications they use operationally.
In recent years many specific applications have proven themselves to operate cost-effectively in this manner.
Many of them by their very operation belong in "the Cloud", like email, or websites.
Some businesses are now experimenting with application hosting options that leverage the scalability of cloud technologies.
Amazon.com is a classic example of providing a platform that scales as required, and now offer that capability to other users. In fact the popular Social technology, Twitter runs on the Amazon Cloud services. Other vendors like IBM and Microsoft are now offering "elastic Cloud" capabilities.
Cloud Technologies
Wikipedia (a cloud technology) defines Cloud Computing as follows:
Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC.
Cloud computing is an outgrowth of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.
In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.
The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.