The history of cloud computing goes back to the 1950s, when mainframe resources in Academia and large corporations became available via terminal computers used for communication rather than for their internal processing capacities. They were given the name thin terminals for this reason.

Thin terminals enabled two very important features: sharing resources of the central computers and minimizing expenses on the client side. These two features became the main drivers of the cloud computing that started evolving in 2000s. Some companies, called Application Service Providers (ASPs), began offering software-based services over the Internet in several ways.

Imagine a small business that required lead management or accounting software to support their sales. Acquiring such applications might not be costly, but this was not even an issue. The challenge that these businesses faced was in running an IT department just to support a few applications. For a small company, outsourcing their...