Ask any IT admin about "cloud" and you'll get a different definition every time.
I’m attending VMworld 2009 in San Francisco this week and have been entrenched in all the cloudspeak. We have to stop overcomplicating what cloud means. The fact is that it means something different depending on who you are talking to and what your priorities are. Cloud is a big fancypants marketing term and not a piece of technology. Sure, as a marketeer in the technology community, I’d absolutely wrap the term cloud around my products and solutions because it stimulates conversation, which, in theory, improves my ability to sell my widgets. Cloud computing is consistently portrayed as a pretty bright blue sky with puffy white clouds and that could not be further from reality. Virtualization and cloud are also used synonymously, which is interesting. But they are not the same, nor are they dependent on one another. Hypervisor does not equal cloud computing. Sure, it can be an ingredient, but not always a requirement in cloud computing. Cloud, to an IT administrator, is an icon in a Visio diagram used to represent anything outside their data center – i.e., the Internet. If you ask any IT administrator, I’d just about guarantee they would say they are doing “cloud” and they will all have different definitions. The IT shops ESG speaks with will also tell you that they are already doing “cloud.” Cloud is nothing more than leveraging the power of the Internet to deliver and/or consume a service. That service can range from a single application to a complete virtual machine or a desktop. The common component is the Internet.
