Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing resources—such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the internet, often with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Instead of owning and maintaining physical hardware or data centers, users access these services from remote providers, enabling scalable, flexible, and efficient IT operations.
This model, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), involves “ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort.”
