Hybrid Clouds

The book I read to research this post was Hybrid Cloud for Dummies by Judith Hurwitz et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. The 1st phase in cloud computing was companies simply using software as a service which meant rather than buying software they used an online provider who had a website where they could do the same job as using the software online. Now we are getting into a more complex where one cloud solution has to work with another and also a company will often have servers for things like back up in addition to users which all has to be compatible with one another. A simple solution might be working with the most established cloud providers. All this interaction is called the hybrid cloud. When Amazon EC2 went down a while back many companies ie foursquare, faced a lot of problems because in addition to hosting their site their back ups went onto the same part of the service which was free. Other companies like Netflix had their back ups go to another part of the service which meant they could get up and running sooner although they had to pay extra for this service. It's worth mentioning I have done a post on cloud computing at http://scratbag.me
There is many different types of this cloud computing one is online databases like amazon's dynamo db or microsoft's azure. There's customer relation management like salesforce.com . There's also office suites like google apps and microsoft office 365. Some providers provide storage like rackspace and live drive. Probably the biggest benefit of cloud computing is that with a lot of providers it's free for home users. Another benefit is that practically any computer can run the providers service eliminating the need for upgrades.