Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges

We live and operate in the world of computing and computers. The Internet has drastically changed the computing world from the concept of parallel computing to distributed computing to grid computing and now to cloud computing. Cloud computing is a new wave in the field of information technology. Some see it as an emerging field in computer science. It consists of a set of resources and services offered through the Internet. Hence, "cloud computing" is also called "Internet computing." The word "cloud" is a metaphor for describing the Web as a space where computing has been preinstalled and exists as a service. Operating systems, applications, storage, data, and processing capacity all exist on the Web, ready to be shared among users. Figure 1 shows a conceptual diagram of cloud computing.