Cloud computing is the buzz word or rather buzz-phrase of the moment, approaching the top of Gartner's hype curve. Experts in the IT industry feel that the rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited.

It will undoubtedly transform the information technology industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate and education is imparted to different classes and students.

In today's scenario, cloud computing is taking the education sector move forward and embrace technology in a better way. Education focused applications and getting delivered with the help of cloud which is more secure and reliable than ever before. This is helping end users in terms of developing a new form of bond with the educational institutions. Moving forward this trend is likely to take into account bigger universities and colleges on a large scale and take cloud computing to the next level.

It is interesting to note that most of us are probably make use of the cloud without realizing that this is the case; whenever we access our Yahoo, Rediff, Gmail or Hotmail accounts, or upload a photo to Facebook, or update our profile at LinkedIn we are using the cloud model of computing information. The potential benefits and risks, however, are more apparent.

Broadly speaking, the cloud computing can be described as on-demand computing, for any user with a network connection. Access to applications, storage and data anywhere, anytime, from any device is the potential result of cloud computing environment. The consumer-level cloud is a good starting point for this – sites like Flickr and Facebook act as digital repositories for data and we can access this data from any internet-enabled device, from our iPhones to our desktop computers. In the case of Flickr and the like, storage of digital images is, from the consumer point of view, somewhere in the cloud computing environment.

A user do not need to know where specifically that information is stored, we just need our Flickr login credentials and a web connection to access that information. We can see this cloud based model as evident in web-based email systems as well.

Cloud computing as implemented is substantially more complex than the user perspective of it suggests, and many of the potential benefits of the cloud actually stem from this. Many of the perspectives on the cloud adopt a "layers" view to describe it. We also need to note a distinction between "private clouds" and "public clouds" which are used to provide services to users outside an organization.