Welcome to the Cloud!

These new ways of building and running applications are enabled by the world of cloud computing, where you access applications, or apps, over the Internet as utilities, rather than as pieces of software running on your desktop or in the server room. This model is already quite common for consumer apps like email and photo sharing, and for certain business applications, like customer relationship management (CRM).

Because almost all apps these days are delivered via a Web browser, it's increasingly hard to tell which applications are “traditional software,” and which are run in the cloud. As with the Internet, applications that run in the cloud have grown so ubiquitous that almost every business user interacts with at least one, whether it's an email service, a Web conferencing application, or a sales system.