niall.baird (5/22/2012)
What's the difference between "the cloud" and a data centre providing hosting? A lot of companies that I've worked with over the years have been quite happy to move their data/processing operations out to a 3rd party data centre, but seem to resist moving operations to "the cloud". As far as I can determine, "the cloud" is just a large data centre (or centres) run by amazon/MS/Google.That being said, the latest MS offering for SQL Azure seems like quite a nice "fit" for those businesses (or lines of business) that need to upgrade their MS Access databases to something more substantial.
No difference. Amazon EC2 is no different than a colocation facility, other than you don't need to buy the hardware. It's equivalent to running a set of VMs from Rackspace.
It can be more, a service or platform (SaaS or PaaS), which is what you get from Salesforce (SaaS) or Azure/RDS (PaaS).
It's funny to me. So many people resisted going to colocated servers, or renting web servers in 1999. Now it's something people think about instantly. The same will happen with the cloud, which is really just the same thing.