Question

What exactly is cloud computing?

• A. A way to organize desktop computers.
• B. Lightweight software that takes up little space on a hard drive.
• C. Computing resources that can be accessed on demand, like electricity from a utility.
• D. The World Wide Web.

Hint:

Think of computing power supplied on demand the way electricity is supplied by a utility.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is C

Cloud computing is best understood as renting computing power the way a home draws electricity from the grid. Instead of buying and running your own servers, storage and software, you tap into a shared pool of these resources over the internet, use exactly what you need at that moment, and scale usage up or down as requirements change, while the provider handles the underlying infrastructure. Around 2010 this became a defining shift in the tech world as major players such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft pushed businesses toward paying for computing as a metered service rather than owning hardware outright.

The remaining choices miss the mark. Organising desktop computers has nothing to do with the on demand, remote nature of the cloud model. Software taking up little disk space is a description of lightweight applications, not of cloud computing itself. And equating cloud computing with the World Wide Web confuses two different things, since the web is a network of linked pages accessed via browsers while cloud computing is a way of delivering computing infrastructure and services remotely. The correct description is option 3, computing resources accessed on demand like a utility.