Two recent books cover this topic well, albeit from very different perspectives: The Little Book of Cloud Computing – 2013 Edition, by L. Nielsen, and The Clout at Your Service, by J. Rosenberg and A. Mateos. Nielsen provides information on the major industry players and surveys current trends. This new paradigm is the broadest possible extension of the traditional client-server computing model, and allows businesses to pay-as-they-go, so they can avoid large investments in hardware platforms, operating systems, memory, and application licenses, and their upgrades.