While distributed computing provides collaborative resource sharing by connecting multiple resources and users to provide administrative, geographic, and dynamic scalability, cloud computing is aimed at providing on-demand applications or services with set goals of reaching improved scalability, transparency, security, monitoring, and management. Also, in cloud environments, the physical implementation does not constitute or is transparent to the service it is offering to the customers.

The following table shows a comparison of a cloud versus distributed computing architecture:

Distributed cloud computing is becoming a prominent expression in the IT industry, with a higher number of vendors and system analysts delivering more systems to provide services that would help organizations become more responsive to market conditions while restraining their individual IT costs.