Cloud computing is the delivery of computing resources, such as processing power, storage, databases and software, over the internet from large shared data centres, paid for on demand instead of bought and run in-house. Services are usually grouped as infrastructure (rented servers), platforms (managed tools for developers) and software delivered as a service. The largest providers, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, host many banking, payments and crypto systems, from storage such as Amazon S3 to core banking platforms. Many blockchain node operators also run in the cloud, which critics say concentrates infrastructure in a few companies and weakens decentralization. Financial regulators treat major cloud providers as critical third parties because an outage can affect many firms at once. Also see Cloud Mining.
Last updated 13 Nov 2026