Before you go any further reading, please click on the short video above.

You’re not cheating, are you? You DID click on the video of Joni Mitchell, right?

Now that you’ve seen and heard Joni, here are my questions: are you just like her? Do you really not know clouds at all?

Of course, this is a computer blog so we’re actually talking about cloud computing and not those puffy white/grey masses of water drops or ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere.

Cloud computing is confusing for many people for a variety of reasons. First, there’s a plethora of cloud services. For example: OneDrive, DropBox, iCloud, Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Adobe and many more.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that there are different types of cloud services. Without going into the meaning in this post, here are the four main types of cloud services:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Recovery as a Service (RaaS)

And, finally, there’s the basic question that many people ask but never truly understand: “What is ‘The Cloud’?”

If you were to use Bing or Google to search, you’d find a cornucopia of articles and webpages all revolving around cloud computing. Many, if not most, are confusing as all get-out. In the next few blog posts, I’m going to tackle “The Cloud” and explain in simple terms what it is, how you use it and what it is not!