A city clerk asks whether moving file shares to Azure still counts as cloud computing if staff keep using the same desktop apps. Which distinction best answers the clerk?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Moving a box across town does not magically make it "cloud." Cloud is about consuming resources as a service—elastic, on-demand, measured—not just parking the same fully managed servers somewhere else. If staff still treat it like basement hardware, they have changed location more than the model.
Full Explanation
Cloud computing emphasizes delivery of IT resources as a service with characteristics such as on-demand self-service and elasticity. Hosting a virtual machine that staff still fully administer like traditional on-premises hardware can be a cloud IaaS building block, but "any remote server" is not the definition. Keeping familiar desktop apps does not disqualify a cloud file service; the key is whether capacity is consumed as a service rather than as owned, always-on hardware.