So just what is cloud computing?

It all starts with the concept of “virtualization.” Virtualization allows a single physical server to be partitioned into multiple “virtual servers”, each given specific allocations of the server’s memory, processing power, bandwidth and disk space. Because the resources are virtualized, it’s possible to increase and decrease them on the fly, meaning you can scale up from a small virtualized environment to a larger one as your needs increase, or scale down should they decrease. Your costs are tied to your configuration — allowing you to tailor your server to your business needs.

Scalable On Demand

Not only do you now have the same ability to scale resources on demand, but you also have the built in redundancy. This redundancy allows for high availability fault tolerable environments across multiple physical servers. Any data uploaded to a virtualized environment is 1:1 backed up on a different physical server, meaning your data is always being backed up for an additional cost. Furthermore, virtual infrastructure reserves enough spare resources to withstand the failure of a physical server. In the event that a physical server fails, the data on it remains available and the resources are simply restarted elsewhere in the cloud. Best of all, this happens automatically.