The rise of cloud technologies, which allow digital media to be stored online rather than on a single computer or device, has been rapid. While most people are familiar with the concept of storing photos on social networking sites, or saving documents to an online account, the cloud is spreading and consumers are applying the virtual ownership ethos to all areas of their lives.

There are three basic types of cloud frameworks: 1. The public external cloud - this refers to openly available services like Salesforce.com or Amazon's cloud compute and storage services; 2. Private trusted clouds - these are 'walled gardens' - clouds to which access is secured and limited to trusted parties, but which have essentially the same features as public clouds. An example of this type would be the UK Government's proposed G-Cloud; and 3. Private internal clouds - this involves adopting cloud-type appliances and installing them inside your data centre, thereby giving you full control of the environment.

And there are different layers of service that sit in these basic cloud frameworks. Today, the key ones are generally termed (from low to high level): 1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) - providing computing power and storage on a utility basis; 2. Platform as a service (PaaS) - providing application middleware and the infrastructure underpinning it as a utility service on which you can develop your own business logic, run applications, etc; and 3. Software as a service (SaaS) - purchasing specific commodity software to provide, for example, email or CRM as a utility service (e.g. Salesforce.com).

Several of these options can be delivered through either public, private or trusted cloud services. For example, PaaS could be exploited as a public Microsoft Azure service, through a trusted Azure service provided by a third party, or as a private cloud deploying an Azure appliance on-premise.

If you use Microsoft Word Web App then you will already have extended your Microsoft Word experience to the web browser, where you can work with documents directly on the website where the document is stored. Word Web App is available for personal use in Windows Live, in organisations that have installed and configured Office Web Apps on their SharePoint site, and for professionals and businesses that subscribe to select Office 365 services.

And if you use Microsoft Word 2010 you can start using Word Web App by saving your documents to your SkyDrive or your SharePoint library. To do this, go to the File tab, click Save & Send, and then click Save to Web or Save to SharePoint. Now, your document is available to view, print, edit in the browser, or re-open in Word. Even if you don't have Word 2010, you can open your files using the Word Web App. For best compatibility, Microsoft recommend Office Word 2003 or later. If you are using Word 2003, install the most recent service pack and save documents on your computer as .docx files then upload the document to a SharePoint site where Office Web Apps are configured, or upload the document to SkyDrive.

When you open your document in Windows Live or SharePoint, Word Web App, your document opens in the browser. If you don't have Microsoft Silverlight 2 or later installed, Word Web App displays a bar with a link to install Silverlight. Silverlight is not required, but documents display more quickly and with greater visual fidelity at high zoom levels if you use the latest version of Silverlight.

In Reading view, you can page through the document, or move to a particular page. Type the number of the page that you want to move to, or use the Previous Page and Next Page buttons. And if you want a closer look, or if you want to see more of the page on the screen, use the Zoom command to increase or decrease your view of the page. You can also use the Find command to search for words or phrases. Search results are highlighted in the document. As with a web page, you can select text in the document and copy it so that it's available to paste in another application.

And it's easy to edit in the browser by simply clicking Edit in Browser. In Editing view, you can add and delete content, and format text. Editing view is optimised for editing content, not displaying the document. Layout is simplified in Editing view, and items that the view cannot display are shown as placeholders. The placeholders prevent you from unintentionally deleting content that can be displayed but not edited in Word Web App. In Editing view, you can type text as usual, and you can use copy/paste and undo/redo commands. You can format text by applying styles and all the text formatting choices that you see on the Home tab.

If you want to see how your changes look in your document, click Save on the File tab, and then switch back to Reading view: on the View tab, click Reading View. Editing in Word Web App is best suited for quick changes, such as making a correction, inserting a picture, or adding more text. If you want the full set of Word capabilities, click the File tab, and then click Open in Word.

And when you're ready to print, Word Web App prints a document as it appears in Reading view. To print a document, in Reading view, click the File tab, and then click Print. A PDF viewer is required for printing in Word Web App. If you don't already have a PDF viewer installed, you are prompted to download one.