Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing resources — compute, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, AI — over the internet, paid for by usage instead of bought outright as hardware. Instead of buying and maintaining a server in your own data center, you rent capacity from a provider (Salesforce, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) that operates the underlying infrastructure for you. You access it through a browser or API, and the provider handles availability, scaling, patching, and security of the layers you don’t manage.
What makes it “cloud”
A workload is genuinely “cloud” when it has most of these properties:
- On-demand self-service — you provision and release resources without a vendor call.
- Broad network access — usable from anywhere over the internet, on any device.
- Resource pooling — the provider’s hardware is shared across many customers (multi-tenancy).
- Rapid elasticity — scale up or down quickly to match load.
- Measured service — billing reflects actual usage (compute hours, storage GB, API calls).
These five properties are the classic NIST definition of cloud computing, and they’re what differentiate cloud from “I just rented a server.”
Why organizations move to cloud
The pitch hasn’t changed in 20 years:
- No upfront hardware spend — opex instead of capex.
- Faster time-to-value — sign up today, use it tomorrow.
- Elastic scale — handle Black Friday without provisioning for it year-round.
- Built-in resilience — providers offer redundancy and disaster recovery you’d struggle to build yourself.
- Continuous updates — the vendor patches, upgrades, and adds features without your team’s effort.
Where Salesforce fits
Salesforce is a cloud platform. Customers don’t install software on their own servers; they log into Salesforce’s environment over the internet. Salesforce runs the data centers, scales the infrastructure, patches the database, applies three releases a year, and keeps the platform available. Customers configure the application to their business — fields, objects, workflows, code — but never touch the underlying hardware or OS.
Verified against: Salesforce Help — Welcome to Salesforce and Trailhead — Salesforce Platform Basics. Last reviewed 2026-05-17.