Many people believe the future of computing is thought to be moving towards something called cloud computing. The notion of cloud computing is to use the internet as your hard drive.  The term “cloud” derives from logical drawings of a network and the internet is often represented as a cloud.  Those of you that use online calendars or web hosted email are already computing in the cloud.  Services like these  are broken down into three major categories:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
2. Platform as a Service(PaaS), and
3. Software as a Service(SaaS).  

An example of IaaS is Microsoft’s SkyDrive.  Microsoft lets you use up to 25 GB of free storage online.  PaaS helps you use programming tools like Java or Python to develop web based applications.  Examples of SaaS are web based email, Google Docs, and our very own secure email spam filter, ProSpam.  The idea behind Software as a Service is to let others worry about the behind the scenes work and lets you as a user just know the software will work.

Maybe one day we won’t even use a traditional operating system on our personal computers to access our software and files or to run applications.  The functionality is already here and user satisfaction is what will keep cloud computing moving forward.