Dad asked me about ‘The Cloud’ as he kept hearing about it, but didn’t know what it was - apart from those fluffy white things we see in the sky.

I told him that he can think of the cloud as renting a car, rather than buying one.

If we don’t know how long we need a car for, we can hire it for an hour, a day, a week or longer and if we need more, we just hire more.

Alternatively, if we know we are going to use the car a lot, we buy it. Buying the car is equivalent to buying a server and setting it up to ‘serve’ up computing services like email and file sharing.

Both renting a car (cloud) and buying a car (server-client) give you the same result: Getting from A to B (computing services) but using the cloud means it´s someone else’s problem to set-up and manage, albeit at the cost of a regular fee.

When choosing a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), it is worthwhile to consider the Practice Guide for Cloud Computing Security.