Cloud computing: New challenge to the entire computer industry

Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC. Cloud computing is an outgrowth of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet. Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, we'd only have to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It's called cloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry. In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing systems interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.