g infrastructure for developing applications, it offers storage. Interestingly, Netflix, its competitor for streaming media services, is a major customer. Netflix stores its movies on Amazon servers. Thus, when Netflix customers in the United States stream movies and TV shows, they access the shows from computers located in Amazon's data centers. Amazon has expanded into applications such as databases and analytics to analyze usage statistics of applications on its site. Its HSM security encryption services is designed to protect the security of files located on Amazon's infrastructure. Other major cloud providers include Microsoft Azure, IBM, Salesforce.com, Rackspace, Google, and Oracle. Rackspace offers hosting in addition to its cloud service. With hosting, customers supply their own servers (computers) and additionally manage the software on their servers. The following is quote from a staff member at a small organization that uses Amazon EC2: My company is a start-up. We rent 50 client computers, one server machine with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) package and one database machine for just 0.50c per hour. There are many features in Amazon to customize the environment according to our requirements. Spinning Applications to the Cloud When organizations talk about moving applications to the cloud, they use the term spin. They spin applications up to the cloud over broadband links between their site www.TechnicalPDF.com and the Internet. When transmitting applications over broadband links to the cloud, companies often protect these transmissions from eavesdroppers and interception by creating Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The VPN creates a secure link between the cloud and the customer by encrypting the data and providing a way to securely decrypt (re-create) the data at the receiving end. Encryption is the process of using a mathematical formula to reorder bits SO that they are unrecognizable to equipment that doesn't have the "key" to decrypt the data into readable data. The VPN also ensures that the