Cloud computing lets an IoT project rent servers, databases and managed services instead of running its own hardware. For connected products this is where device data usually lands: a broker or ingestion endpoint in the cloud receives telemetry, a time-series database stores it, and applications query it from anywhere. Elastic capacity matters because fleets grow unevenly and traffic spikes when thousands of devices reconnect at once.
The cloud is not the only option. Latency, bandwidth cost and data residency push some processing toward the device or a local gateway, which is the subject of edge computing. Most real deployments combine both, and Edge vs cloud vs fog explains how to split the work.
Part of the IoT Glossary. Spotted an error or a missing term? Tell us.