To be quite honest, until a few weeks ago, I believed cloud computing had to do with actual clouds...Whenever I heard that some of my pictures were stored up in the cloud, I would look up to the skies and assume those pictures had found their way up there somehow. You can imagine my utmost shock when I eventually discovered that it simply meant someone somewhere was storing up my pictures/data (on my behalf) in their facility remotely...Let me explain better so you do not (like myself) keep staring into the skies when ever you hear your pictures and videos have been backed up in the cloud.

In very very simplistic terms, cloud computing has to do with the provision of IT services over the internet; By this, I mean the supply of IT facilities and solutions, which can be easily accessed by you wherever you are, as long as you have the right tools and credentials to gain access to said services.

Okay, okay, think of it this way...Remember back when we would download games on our phones from play store? and if you were unfortunate enough to have lost your phone, you had to re-download the game and painstakingly re-start the game allover from level 1? I know! Dark days! Well most games now provide you with the option of continuing your game exactly where you stopped on your previous device. They tell you your progress is saved in the cloud, and that once you log in with the right credentials, you can re-access it, and simply pick up where you left off. This pretty much sums it all up. Instead of losing all that data, it is backed up in some data base and readily made available to you upon request.

These cloud services that are readily supplied by providers over the internet, range from computers, servers, operating systems, networks, databases, you name it, and the overall aim is to handle that aspect of your business for you, so you can focus on growing your business, and making profit.

Worthy of mention is the fact that you simply pay for what you consume, as against having to purchase all these IT equipment (and staff), some of which might eventually not be put to use (due to over-estimation).

It also leads to faster deployment of your application and services, since the burden of setting up those equipment and environment has been lifted off you. This means that instead of taking weeks or sometimes months to roll out your products, it can be launched in as little as minutes or hours. It also means that as demand for your product/application increases, you can easily increase/enlarge your capacity to cope with this demand, as against having to go shopping for additional servers which might take days or weeks to integrate. In others words it is elastic and can increase or decrease in demand to fit the given situation/context.

Also, using the scenario of the game, which I gave above, data recovery is seamless in cloud, (since it is backed up in multiple servers) as against using your own on-premises infrastructure, which might mean it's ultimate loss.

There are numerous other benefits which I would touch in greater details some other time. For now, just know that it is cost effective, leads to faster deployment/innovation, has faster data recovery, and is highly available (since it can be accessed remotely).