Cloud based services make advanced technology useful to non-technical people. All the complex technical details are quietly hidden and taken care of for you.
Everything is moving to the cloud. If you're a smart business owner, you're already looking at ways to leverage somebody else's technology so you can focus on your business. Now even your entire phone system can exist in the cloud, you just plug your phones into your internet connection instead of a landline or PBX.
To most business owners, cloud computing is a marketing term designed to make you feel comfortable letting someone else manage your technology so you can focus on the things you're good at.
To a computer geek such as myself cloud computing is a world where complex services automatically grow (and shrink) on demand. These services are hosted in massive interconnected data centers with seemingly endless racks of servers, redundant power, connectivity, and cooling. More infrastructure than any small or medium business could ever hope to afford. Cloud computing lets even the smallest business take full advantage of these server farms.
With services in the cloud you don't have to worry about things like upgrades, security, redundancy, and scalability; service providers do all that for you transparently and automatically.
Just like your email, website, and other online services it makes perfect sense to let someone else manage your phone system for you.
Because your phone system exists entirely in the cloud, if your internet connection is affected by unfortunate circumstances such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes, floods, or alien invasions: