In a nutshell, it’s a rather vague term coined by the IT industry to describe web-based computing services that are hosted outside of your organisation. So, instead of you running your own server on your business premises, you have a third party IT company host it off-premises, on their servers.

With Office 365, for example, Microsoft owns the servers and manages data storage, computation and software.

You may not know it but many services you use every day are a part of the cloud— web-based email, mobile banking – your online photo storage. And because it’s located in the cloud, you can access it from virtually anywhere with an Internet connection.