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Your V2 CloudCare team — real people, on the line.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services (servers, storage, databases, networking, software) over the internet, billed based on what you use rather than what you own. Instead of buying a physical server and maintaining it in a back room, you rent capacity from a provider that runs the hardware in a data center somewhere else.
That’s the entire concept. Everything past this point is detail.
You already use cloud computing more than you probably realize. Checking email through Gmail, saving a file to Dropbox, streaming a show on Netflix: all of it runs on infrastructure you never touch and never see. The show doesn’t live on your TV. The file doesn’t live on your laptop. Someone else’s server does the work, and your device just displays the result.
Three things make a service “cloud computing" rather than just “a website" or “an app."
Resource pooling. A provider runs large banks of servers and divides that capacity among many customers at once. Your workload might share a physical machine with a dozen other companies, isolated from each other by software rather than a locked door.
On-demand self-service. You provision what you need through a dashboard or an API, not a phone call to a vendor’s sales team. Need more storage at 11pm on a Sunday? You add it yourself. If you want the mechanics of how providers allocate that capacity, we covered it in provisioning in cloud computing.
Elastic scaling. Capacity expands or contracts with demand. A retailer running a Black Friday sale can scale up servers for the weekend and scale back down Monday morning, paying for the spike without owning hardware that sits idle the other 51 weeks of the year.
This is the part most explanations skip, and it’s where the confusion starts.
Virtualization is software that carves one physical server into multiple isolated virtual machines, each behaving like its own independent computer with its own operating system and storage. It’s a technology. It predates cloud computing by decades and works perfectly well on a server sitting in your own building.
Cloud computing is a delivery model. It’s what happens when someone runs virtualized infrastructure at scale in a data center and rents it to you over the internet.
So virtualization is the engine. Cloud computing is the service built on the engine.
The phrase “virtual cloud computing" gets used to describe the combination of the two: virtualized resources delivered as a cloud service rather than run on hardware you own. It isn’t a distinct third category. If a vendor uses the term, they’re almost always describing virtual machines or virtual desktops delivered from someone else’s data center.
That combination is what we do. Our cloud desktops run as virtual machines in our data centers, and your team reaches them from any device with an internet connection. Nothing is installed locally. A new hire gets a fully configured Windows desktop in under 20 minutes, with no laptop to image and nothing physical to ship if they work remotely.
Cloud services split into three layers, each handing you a different amount of control and a different amount of maintenance.
| Model | What you manage | What the provider manages | Example use case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) | OS, applications, data | Physical servers, storage, networking, virtualization | Running a custom web app on rented server capacity |
| Platform as a Service (PaaS) | Application code and data | OS, runtime, servers, storage | Deploying an app without configuring the underlying server |
| Software as a Service (SaaS) | Your data and user settings | Everything else, including the application itself | Using Gmail, Salesforce, or a cloud-hosted desktop |
Table 1: The three cloud service models, ranked from most control (IaaS) to least maintenance (SaaS).
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) sits inside the SaaS category. Instead of renting an application, you rent a full virtual desktop, complete with an operating system, storage, and installed software, that you access remotely. If you’re evaluating vendors in this category, we compared the main options in our guide to the top Desktop as a Service providers.
The service model tells you what you’re renting. The deployment model tells you who else is renting alongside you.
A public cloud runs on infrastructure shared across many customers, owned and operated by the provider. This is the most common and usually the most cost-effective option, since the provider spreads hardware costs across its whole customer base.
A private cloud is dedicated to a single organization, either hosted on-site or by a third party on isolated hardware. Financial institutions and healthcare organizations with strict compliance requirements sometimes choose this route, trading cost efficiency for exclusive control.
A hybrid cloud combines both. A company might keep sensitive records in a private environment while running everyday applications on public infrastructure. Hybrid setups are common during a migration, when a business moves workloads in stages rather than all at once.
Cost is the headline reason, but it’s rarely the only one.
Buying servers means paying upfront (capital expenditure) for capacity you might not fully use for years. Renting cloud infrastructure converts that into a predictable monthly line item (operating expenditure) that scales with actual usage.
Remote work is the second driver, and it’s the one that shows up fastest in day-to-day operations. A team spread across three time zones needs a way to work from the same environment without shipping laptops or troubleshooting a dozen different device configurations. Virtual desktops solve this directly: the desktop lives in the data center, and the device is just a window into it. Smaller teams evaluating this specifically should look at our breakdown of VDI for small business.
The third driver is maintenance. Patching servers, replacing failing hard drives, and monitoring for intrusions is a full-time job that most small and medium-sized businesses don’t want to staff for. Handing that off to a provider is often the real reason a company migrates, even when cost savings gets the credit in the board meeting.
Cloud security runs on a shared responsibility model. The provider secures the infrastructure: physical data centers, the network backbone, the virtualization layer. The customer secures what they put on top of it: access controls, data classification, user permissions.
This split trips people up constantly. “We moved to the cloud" doesn’t mean security became someone else’s problem. It means the boundary of your responsibility moved, not that it disappeared.
We handle our side with daily automated backups, multi-factor authentication, and a 99.95% uptime SLA, and we offer a HIPAA-compliant option for healthcare customers who need it. But no provider can stop a customer from reusing a weak password or granting broad access they didn’t need to grant. That part stays with you regardless of which vendor you choose.
No. The internet is the network that connects your device to a cloud provider’s servers. Cloud computing is the set of services (storage, processing, software) delivered across that network.
Virtual cloud computing describes virtualized resources, typically virtual machines or virtual desktops, delivered as a cloud service over the internet rather than run on hardware you own. It isn’t a separate category from cloud computing. It’s a phrase that emphasizes the virtualization layer underneath.
Virtualization is the underlying technology that splits one physical server into multiple virtual machines. Cloud computing is the service model built on top of that technology and delivered to customers over the internet. You can virtualize servers without using the cloud at all.
Cloud storage is one specific service inside cloud computing, limited to saving and retrieving files. Cloud computing is the broader category that also includes processing power, databases, networking, and full application delivery.
Most already use some form of it, even informally, through email or file sharing. The bigger question for a small business is usually how far to extend it: whether to also move core infrastructure like desktops and servers, not whether to use the cloud at all.
It depends on the resources available to secure each option. A large cloud provider typically invests more in physical security, redundancy, and patching than a small business can afford to replicate in-house. But cloud security still depends on how the customer configures access and permissions on their end.
Pricing depends entirely on the service model and provider. IaaS and PaaS are typically usage-based (per hour, per gigabyte). DaaS pricing is usually structured around the resources assigned to each virtual machine. Our current pricing is at v2cloud.com/pricing.
Your V2 CloudCare team — real people, on the line.