A simple way to explain cloud is ‘anything that resides on a web server’. Let us take the example of email. You can either deploy your own email server and have all your incoming emails stored on your computer or server. That’s the traditional way. An alternative is to use services like gmail or hotmail where all your email is on a third party server – you need access to the internet to reach out to Google or Hotmail server to access your emails. These are cloud-based services.