Cloud computing means renting computing power, storage, and software over the internet from a provider’s data centers, instead of buying and maintaining your own physical hardware.
Rather than running servers in your own building, cloud computing lets you use computing resources — processing power, databases, storage, networking — that live in a provider's data center and are accessed remotely, usually billed by how much you actually use.
Cloud computing turns a large upfront hardware cost into a flexible, ongoing operating expense. A business can scale up resources during a traffic spike and scale back down afterward, without owning idle servers the rest of the year. The trade-off is depending on the provider's reliability, pricing, and security practices.
Last reviewed: September 2026