“Cloud” is a definite buzzword right now, but what came first? Historically, companies operated with on-prem computers—short for on-premise computers—where they had racks full of thin and wide computers called servers slid into multiple slots in their server rooms (giant rooms with many racks full of servers) or in even bigger data centers. A server is a regular computer in a lot of ways, but it’s bigger and has more memory and larger disks, but it doesn’t have monitors or keyboards regularly connected and is instead set up to be accessed via the company’s network. See Figure 20-1 for a view of several servers.