Recently I read an article about cloud computing and the Microsoft Office Web Apps available at office.live.com. Since I don’t have Microsoft Office installed on my computer this seemed like a good way to access the applications for free. However, I don’t quite understand the concept of cloud computing and how it works – could you explain this a bit further, particularly regarding Microsoft Office Web Apps?

I don’t blame you for not completely understanding the term cloud computing as this is one of the latest buzz words in the IT industry that has surfaced in the last year or so. Cloud can be interpreted in many different ways (depending on whether we are taking an enterprise or consumer perspective on the topic). For the purposes of our discussion we can consider cloud as relating to services being provisioned over the internet which traditionally would have been locally installed on a user’s computer. A good example of cloud computing in the consumer sense is Dropbox (www.dropbox.com). This service allows files to be stored “in the cloud” on the remote Dropbox servers (which is actually Amazon.com S3 storage, to be precise, but that’s a discussion for another day). The upshot is that the files are not stored on your local computer, so they are accessible from any location with an internet connection (as you can logon to the Dropbox website to view your files online) or alternatively you can also install the Dropbox client on your computer (or computers) and all the files in your Dropbox will be downloaded and synchronise across to each computer, which is fantastic if you need to keep data in sync between several different computers.

As you can see with the Dropbox example, traditionally the files would have been stored on your local computer. However, we are now storing the files in the cloud so they are instead accessible on-demand. This is similar to Apple’s MobileMe which allows you to store your email, calendar, files, and photo galleries (amongst other things) in the cloud so these can be accessed over the web, on your computer, or on your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. Society is quickly trending towards mobility – people are using mobile devices, such as laptops and smart phones, more often than previously. Combined with the greater availability of high-speed broadband and mobile broadband (such as 3G) this means people are accessing their data on the go and expect to have access to their data anytime, anywhere. Additionally, they don’t want the hassle of having to manually synchronise data between their various devices – if they modify a document on their laptop, the expectation is that when they open that same document on their desktop the modifications are automatically synchronised.

The need for this greater mobility and access to data means that the data can no longer be stored on individual devices. Instead, they need to be stored on shared servers which are network accessible, giving all devices access to that central repository of information. However, this is just not limited to the storage of data as we are fast seeing the introduction of web-enabled applications, also known as rich internet applications. This is also called software as a service – instead of delivering software as a product it can be delivered as an on-demand service over the internet. In your question you have mentioned Microsoft Office Web Apps, which is a cut-down version of Microsoft Office that allows you to create and edit documents using software delivered through a web browser, rather than having to install the software on your local computer. Similar services are also offered by Google, such as Google Docs (docs.google.com) which performs similar functions using Google-based tools.

Hopefully this provides you with the background surrounding the use and applicability of cloud-based technologies. We have just scratched the surface with this explanation and there are certainly plenty of other aspects that can be considered, so if you have any other questions or would like further information on specific aspects of cloud computing, please feel free to contact me.