I thought for my first Cloud Hypermarket blog, I would write something simple and straightforward for those of you who are struggling with the very concept of the cloud. I have explained it to several businessmen who have been pleased that they have eventually got their head around what is essentially a straightforward concept.

The problem is really that ‘the cloud’ has many different guises, some of which are absolutely pointless for a small business owner in charge of his own IT to understand fully. Anyone who has no technical expertise will be baffled when they start trying to find out about this ‘cloud’ that they’ve been hearing about. If they for instance, stumble over Amazon Cloud Computing and think – ‘I can use Amazon for shopping and this might be a good place to start’ and read on the homepage...

To use Amazon EC2, you simply: Select a pre-configured,templated image to get up and running immediately. Or create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings.

...more ‘simple’ instructions follow, but anyone I’m talking about would have closed their browser and gone to get a nice cup of tea, deciding not to bother with this ‘cloud thing’ anymore. Clearly Amazon cloud computing was not what they were looking for, but even if they had found something that would have made sense to them, they may not have fared much better.

I’ve had a little hunt around and was reading a blog on ABJ Entrepreneur where one of their bloggers described the Cloud in his version of “simple terms”: ‘In a nutshell, the cloud refers to a new computing paradigm in which highly scalable computing power and storage are hosted in massive data centers by third-party providers, and accessed on-demand over the Internet’. I feel that ‘new computing paradigm’ isn’t conducive to a consummate and elementary cohesive exemplification of ‘the cloud’ (see what I did there, the most misunderstood word for some is still ‘the cloud’). You can read the article here and make up your own mind. I am not criticising this post, it is pretty much the most clear and simple explanation of the concept I have found.

Lets get back to my question, Why is the cloud (called) the cloud and it seems the answer to this is simple – the cloud was a name given to the early internet. ‘The Cloud’ is simply derived from the concept that you can move all of the stuff on your computers and servers to another place and access it via the web. That is it. Honest. The explanations that follow on from this (a lot of them which feature pictures of clouds to make things a little more complicated) are where the confusion begins to set in. This is where the real questions begin and where Cloud Hypermarket can help.

Andrew Gradwell