Making Sense of It All

Cloud computing: Instead of owning all its hardware and software, an agency buys, as needed, information technology services that are delivered via the Internet from a contractor that maintains the equipment and applications.

Enterprise services: Providing standard applications and hardware-like servers for an organization for lower costs and faster security fixes.

Logical partitioning: Separates a computer's basic functions such as processing, memory and storage so it can run multiple operating systems, increasing efficiencies.

Private cloud: An agency provides secure IT hardware and applications to users over a private network rather than the Internet, which is viewed as less secure.

Software as a service: Like cloud computing for a single application, a vendor hosts SaaS and a user accesses it over the Internet. Unlike traditional packaged applications, the SaaS vendor owns and maintains the software.

Virtualization: Through logical partitioning, physical IT resources such as servers, desktops and storage devices can be used by more than one application, slashing electricity costs and reducing the time needed to recover from a network crash.