Cloud computing has been emerging out as a new and evolving paradigm with tremendous momentum. It is one of the most acceptable information technology based service which drew the attention of the people not only from the academia, industry but also registered its popularity among the general people. Features like scalability, elasticity, less entry cost, easy to access and subscription and pay per use etc. compel the businesses and end users to migrate themselves from the traditional platform

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... o the cloud based platform. With the wide acceptability of cloud computing based services in the society, people have various myths like some think it as a new name of internet, as it shares many features of the internet while others feel it as another name of existing technology like distributed system, grid computing, and parallel computing etc.. This paper will help in making people aware of this technology by highlighting the points of difference with the existing technology and focusing on the various advantages and area of application which presents the evidence of its popularity and continual growth. The work in the paper will end with the discussion on the status of various issues and shortcomings from which it is suffering along with the present and future scope in this popular area.