I wish I could say Cloud Computing means computing (or with some more wishful thinking, coding) in the clouds. I have done my share of coding in the plane flying between the client and home office so I have cloud computed from that perspective but the term really isn't as glamorous, and these days, as expensive as flying. Yesterday, a few of us were giving our 'expert' opinion on why Google is enjoying a healthy growth and Microsoft isn't. As usual, yours truly couldn't keep quiet so he said Google has already captured the search engine market; now it is after SaaS, Cloud Computing and mobile markets. That's when a friend asked, "What is Cloud Computing?" And I realized, I had never thought of an elevator pitch version of the answer. It would have been easy to say, "Go look in Wikipedia." But that's a pretty old technique to show arrogance or deflect the answer when you don't have one. Plus, he wouldn't have asked that question if that's what he intended to do. I did tell him what I knew about the concept but now I have an elevator pitch version of my description of Cloud Computing... if only some one would ask again! Anyway, here is goes.

Planning and designing the infrastructure is complex and expensive for any organization. Plus, every organization must plan and spend money for their peak load. Wouldn't it be nice if you could 'rent' the infrastructure created by somebody else and pay only for what you use? You don't have to plan for and buy the hardware, you don't have to hire so many people to maintain the infrastructure. No need to worry about patching or upgrading your hardware and system software. If you want to look at Cloud Computing from a technical perspective, every organization needs computing power, network, storage, database, some kind of messaging capabilities etc. Cloud Computing is a computing platform that provides all this over the network. Typically a network Internet is shown as a cloud on architecture diagrams and since the computing infrastructure is provided over the Internet the term is called Cloud Computing. You typically only pay for the parts of the infrastructure that you use and only for the time you use just like utilities. And this is why the concept is also called utility computing. Just like Google Docs provides a word processing software as a service over the Internet cloud computing platform provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is why some people say cloud computing is a realization of IaaS concepts. The beauty of cloud computing is that if you deploy an application on the cloud the infrastructure expands (scales) as the need of your application increases - something like this can be extremely useful to the likes of TurboTax whose infrastructure is loaded heavily around April 15 (remember a couple of years ago IRS had to extend the filing deadline?). Many vendors provides services in the cloud computing space and they all focus on a specific niche aspect of cloud computing. If you want to know more, Wikipedia explains it pretty well (Come on, I already explained it. It's okay to mention Wikipedia now!).

You are probably on the top floor by now or you are holding the door and still talking about cloud computing but you can get your point across with this much information.