I've attended CA World, itSMF New Zealand, itSMF Portugal and multiple days of a COBIT 5 development workshop all in the last 10 days. The interesting thing to me was that the primary topic in all stops was the emergence of Cloud Computing! One of the fundamental issues with Cloud Computing are the multiple definitions, so after spending some time with my friend, fellow blogger and Cloud aficionado David Wilt, I thought I would share the definition we at CA Technologies use for Cloud Computing.
Many of us, including myself have been referencing the "the Cloud" for years with references to fog, Scotch mist and even the odd cloud photos in our PowerPoints and blogs. We used to mean something amorphous, usually about networks or the Internet.
This is not what I mean when I talk about cloud!
At CA, "cloud" means cloud computing, and it's not about a mystical, monolithic thing out there called "the Cloud." In fact, "clouds" aren't really things at all. Cloud computing is about bringing together many existing technologies and approaches in a new way for delivering and consuming technology as services.
There are indeed many different definitions out there and I believe that the best definition comes from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. Let me go into a little more detail for you.
When people say "the Cloud" they mean what NIST calls a public Cloud deployment model. Public Clouds offer services to essentially anyone willing to pay for them. These are the ones most of us are familiar with, like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2.
Enterprises also use a Cloud computing model to provide what NIST calls a private Cloud. Private Clouds can be on-premise and operated by the internal IT organization using its own resources. A managed service provider (MSP) can host and even operate a private Cloud specifically for a single customer, using the MSP's own compute resources.