The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) defines cloud computing as: “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” C.I.A Bytes puts it this way, in traditional computing the computer and its peripherals such as

C.I.A Bytes puts it this way, in traditional computing the computer and its peripherals such as keyboard, printer and hard drive combine to perform a series of inputs, outputs, processing and storage while being physically located in the same space or very close proximity. In the cloud computing environments it is quite similar, the key difference being that the storage device(s) and often processing are no longer located in the same place as the input and output peripherals, thus a network interface becomes necessary to provide access to data assets held on the storage device(s). There are three categories of services, offered by the Cloud: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).