Cloud computing - is not sitting in algebra class and staring out the window.  Although, some might have debated vigorously with the teacher.  Cloud computing is nothing new, some of those that have been affiliated with the computer industry for more than thirty (30) years may remember time sharing mainframes.  Time sharing was great for small to medium size organizations that couldn't afford a mainframe but could buy "time" off of a mainframe along with a pool of other small to medium size businesses.  The same concept with condominium time sharing - you purchase one of fifty-two weeks of a single unit; then pray you have enough points to trade it for a better location each year because your family is "bored" (I digress).

Today, computers are commodity items.  A workstation PC can go for as little as $300 and a server for as little as $1,000.  To some degree they have become disposable.  The challenges to an IT group are the number of servers you roll through doing everyday business.  A server for the database, a server for the accounting system, a server for the telephone system, a server for email, a server for the content management system, etc.  With each server comes the fun of moving data off the old system and power usage.  Over the past few years the hardware that runs the operating systems has more capacity than the operating system can consume.  While typing this article the CPU is registering around 0.5% usage!  That means this computer has 99.5% availability for 199 more users to type as well.  The final frontier is telecommunications access and speed.  The Internet is now everywhere at unthinkable speeds.  When you put these variables together it is natural for a new business paradigm to emerge - cloud computing.

Cloud computing companies simply put large servers in their data centers, connect those data centers to the Internet, and sell you a percentage of their available computing time!

So why consider using cloud computing?  Think about the example of only using 0.5% of the CPU to type this article; technically I shold've paid 0.5% of the purchase price for this computer.  But, that is impossible since the manufacturer doesn't let me buy a slice of computer.  The reason to consider cloud computing is two fold; cost and transition.  Ambit was able to take their monthly server cost (equipment, telecom,  and power) of $385 per month down to $75 / month with a cloud solution.  Since the data is on a separate cloud "volume" from the server, we can simply increase the size of the server without having to move the data when the time comes.

Here are two of the best cloud companies on the market:

Amazon EC2 aws.amazon.com/ec2

Rackspace www.rackspace.com