Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2011 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: A, University of Kent, language: English, abstract: Computers have increasingly become the central tool for information management for governments, corporations, non-profit organizations and individuals around the globe. The emergence of the internet has only solidified this fact even more. As computers have acquired this significant and dominant role in the affairs of mankind, a plethora and wide-array of advancements in computer technology has naturally occurred. Relatively recent hardware innovations have brought the world tablet PCs, transformer pads, smartphones with extraordinary computing capabilities, and desktop PCs with unprecedented storage and processing speeds. The realm of software development has produced countless pieces of software which cover an exceedingly wide range of functions. Even so, neither software, nor hardware alone stands as the most cutting edge computing tool. Interestingly enough, it is a marriage between the two that has become the single most ground-breaking revolution in current computing. It is known as cloud computing. Although cloud computing has various security-based disadvantages which must be addressed by cloud providers as well as consumers, the solution to these disadvantages, as well as the benefits of employing cloud computing in general, greatly outweigh the disadvantages. While the notion of cloud computing has arguably been around as long as the idea of the internet itself, cloud computing as it is understood today got its kick start with companies such as Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Service which both offered online applications (Hempel, 2009; Tonellato, 2001). Witnessing the success of these two endeavors and seeing an opportunity for expansion in this realm, Google launched its own cloud computing service, Google Docs, in 2006 (Langley, 2008). Since then, countless other companies
