There’s still a great deal of confusion about the exact meaning of “cloud.” The industry has only itself to blame for this. “Cloud” means nothing more than taking the servers you have today—either the exact same ones or their equivalent—and relocating them to a data center. You can think of the data center as a kind of hotel for servers. A major benefit of the cloud is that the data center where the servers are located offers complimentary services—such as physical security, redundant power supplies, Internet connectivity, HVAC, and fire protection—that are far superior to what you could afford to provide in a typical office building. In addition, providers can consolidate hardware. This makes access to computing power much more economical, makes it far easier to protect against outages, and makes services readily scalable.