The cloud refers to using remote servers owned and maintained by third-party companies rather than maintaining one's own servers. There are several options for hosting applications and data including owning physical servers, renting space in a data center, using cloud infrastructure from providers, or using serverless cloud computing. Software as a Service (SaaS) is also an option where third parties provide and maintain software. Cloud computing provides services beyond just applications like data storage, internet hosting, and network maintenance.

1. First, let us define what the “cloud” is. The extremely simple definition is that - The Cloud is
basically a fancy word for somebody else’s computers. Cloud Computing is the concept of
renting out another company’s servers in order to run your applications or operations.
If your organization is in the business of software applications or a website that other people
use, you have a few options. You can buy your own servers and host them on your premises.
You are then responsible for maintaining those servers, including a dedicated rack space, taking
care of power supply, server cooling, network and internet bandwidths and the numerous other
things that come with having your own server facility.
Another option is to rent out space in a data center for your servers. You then outsource the
physical hosting of your server, and you simply just have to connect to your servers virtually
from your premises, and run your operations on them remotely. The data center takes care of
the physical security of the servers, and everything your server needs to function.
Yet another option is to use a cloud provider for your operations, workloads and data storage.
With this option you do not have to purchase any hardware at all. The cloud provider does
everything for you. All you need to do is connect to your virtual hardware from any place you
have an internet connection. You have the option of spinning up or shutting down servers as
you need, and pay as you go. This is extremely low maintenance and comes with a host of
advantages as we will see.
Even within cloud computing, you can get even more abstract. How about you don’t even know
or care what server your applications are running on? You just deploy your code and it just runs.
You have that option too, and it’s called serverless cloud computing. Of course, it’s not really
serverless, but from your perspective it might as well be.
Finally, another option for organizations is to go the SaaS route. SaaS is Software as a Service,
and is an option if you don’t want the hassle of even creating your own application, but run your
operations using software which is maintained and run by other companies.
I should also mention that Cloud computing does not just apply to applications, but also things
like data storage, internet hosting, network maintenance and a ton of other things.