Walking through Waterloo station down the travelators to the Bakerloo line, I was visually bombarded by huge 'Welcome To The Cloud' posters from Microsoft, advertising the benefits of Cloud computing, so I thought I'd write a little about the benefits of 'The Cloud'

The main feature of cloud computing is to provide high-availability and fault-tolerance, and can be tailored to meet a users basic needs, with additional features or services programmed or installed as required.

There are private and public clouds, and clouds offered as services over the internet are public. A private cloud is licensed, and deployed to a company through wired technology. It's ideal for sizeable businesses that require fast performance and full management and control over storage and access.

Cloud providers should always have and demonstrate a solid disaster recovery process and business continuity plan in case of a critical problem, to back up and recover all that is on your servers, and allow you to continue with business as usual in the meantime.

Photo: mansikka (Flickr)