Grid, Distributed and Cloud Computing Resources Primer 2021

Cloud computing describes a broad movement to treat IT services as a commodity with the ability to dynamically increase or decrease capacity to match usage needs. By leveraging shared infrastructure and economies of scale, cloud computing presents a compelling business model. It allows users to control the computing services they access, while sharing the investment in the underlying IT resources among consumers.

When the computing resources are provided by another organization over a wide-area network, cloud computing is similar to an electric power utility. The providers benefit from economies of scale, which in turn enables them to lower individual usage costs and centralize infrastructure costs. Users pay for what they consume. Users can also increase or decrease their usage, and leverage the shared underlying resources. With a cloud computing approach, a cloud customer can spend less time managing complex IT resources and more time investing in core mission work.