3. Cloud computing vs. mobile cloud computing
3.1. Cloud computing
‘‘Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services’’ [6].
A cluster of computer hardware and software that offer the services to the general public (probably for a price) makes up a ‘public cloud’. Computing is therefore offered as a utility much like electricity, water, gas etc. where you only pay per use. For example, Amazon’s Elastic cloud, Microsoft’s Azure platform, Google’s App Engine and Salesforce are some public clouds that are available today. However, cloud computing does not include ‘private clouds’ which refer to data centers internal to an organization. Therefore, cloud computing can be defined as the aggregation of computing as a utility and software as a service.