Have you heard about the cloud? I'll bet you've heard about it at least once today. From business meetings to television commercials, everyone is talking about the cloud and how it's revolutionizing the world.

There are two questions I get about the cloud: "What is it?" and "How can I profit from it?"

ON-DEMAND SELF-SERVICE
A cloud solution should be self-service in that once you've picked a service and started using it, all management should be under your control. Let's suppose that your business buys and sells antique furniture. You sell that furniture from your website and through third party sites such as eBay. You want to be able to add images of your furniture and have them accessible from any retailer you choose. With a cloud solution you can control who does and does not have access. You don't have to call up your cloud provider and ask them to set the permissions for you.

Though you can pay a premium and get full-service cloud solutions, most businesses choose self-service options to cut down on cost. Having cloud solutions be self-service allows you access to much higher-end machines than you could afford on your own, without the overhead of hiring specialized talent to maintain those machines. In short, you can do it yourself.

BROAD NETWORK ACCESS
You have to be able to access your cloud solution from anywhere in the world, provided you have a connection to the Internet. Going back to the antique furniture business, let's say you have 20 locations nationwide. With a cloud solution you could upload images from any of those stores. There would be no need to get all of those images to a single point and then upload. Anyone with a cellphone could add new images.

And since it's a self-service solution, you control who can and cannot add images. The only limiting factor is an Internet connection is required at your stores. In America, it's very difficult to be in a location where at least partial Internet connectivity isn't available.

RESOURCE POOLING
This is the characteristic that makes cloud solutions so much more affordable than traditional infrastructure. Cloud providers buy these incredibly powerful machines, and everyone shares the resources. Whenever user demand increases, the provider buys more machines and the users get access to those additional resources.

Nearly every server I've worked on had resources that weren't used all the time. That means you've paid for resources you aren't using. That's wasted money.

With cloud solutions, you only pay for what you use. So if you have 20 machines with each one using only half of its CPU and memory, then you can move to a cloud solution and pay for 10 machines instead. And don't worry about having to keep a certain amount of resources in reserve. With cloud computing you get this next characteristic too!

RAPID ELASTICITY
With the traditional model, whenever you ran out of resources on a server you'd have to buy a whole new server to either replace or add to your server. That translates into huge cost increases each time a new server is added. But with a cloud solution, the costs are more linear because you pay for what you use.

Going back to the antique furniture example, let's say one of your retail sites is your own website, and you were featured on a national news show. You go from getting several hundred hits on your website each day to getting hundreds of thousands of hits each day. If you weren't using a cloud solution, you'd have to scramble to buy several new servers and get them online before people stopped coming to your site.

But armed with a cloud solution, the resources would be added automatically and---again---you only pay for what you use. You can handle much larger fluctuations in demand and subsequently lose a lot less business when people aren't able to get to your site.

MEASURED SERVICE
So why do you only have to pay for what you use in a cloud solution? Because your service provider can accurately measure your usage. If your costs are known, then you can accurately price your goods and services. Cloud service providers have built all the tools needed to track usage, and bill for it.

Let's go back to the example in which your website is featured on a national news show. While you get all that extra traffic, your costs also go up. But when that initial buzz dies down and you are back to only several thousand a day, you will pay less since you are using less.

But, if you were using traditional solutions and you had bought new servers, I don't know any manufacturer that would let you return a server after you've used it for a few months.

IS CLOUD FOR YOU?
While these are the common characteristics of cloud solutions, there are many variations. If you're considering a move to a cloud solution, take stock of what you currently have. Consider all your current costs and limitations in your current system. Once you have that, think about where you want to be. With that in hand you can find any number of IT consultants that would be happy to work with you to find a service provider that would take you from where you are, to where you want to be.

All things being equal, the cloud can help you control your costs, provide better user experiences and expand your business quicker than traditional methods allow. It's up to you to take advantage of the cloud.