So What Exactly Is "Cloud Computing"?

The business term known as the "cloud" seems to be getting thrown around a lot nowadays. It's one of the latest buzzwords for companies big and small. But what exactly is this "cloud", and what does "cloud computing" refer to, anyway?

Most people just think of a cloud as one of those giant white puffballs up in the sky. In the business sense, it's much different. According to InformationWeek Magazine, a cloud is "A model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."

Although this may sound confusing, the definition of a cloud can be easily simplified. Sys-con's Don McVittie had this to say about the cloud: "The “Cloud” is someone else’s data center running your app." Yeah, it really is that simple. Software As A Service evolved.

The hype-sters will no doubt howl about this with the following (and maybe more) chants - “reliability!” – because Salesforce.com didn’t have that already? “redundancy!” – because “redundant data center” didn’t mean anything? “Agility!” because you can’t spin up another VM in your own data center?

So if you’re interested and want to delve past the hype, “the cloud” means moving all or part of your application to someone else’s data center and letting them worry about uptime, etc. While many will wrap a ton of verbiage around claiming there’s more to it, from an enterprise IT perspective there still isn’t. If your web farm got over-burdened you would bring up another instance and put it behind your load balancer or ADC, which is what a cloud provider would do. The difference being that you’d pay your staff to do this work, and in the cloud you pay them to do it. Staff being a sunk cost, this might not be your best option. So make certain you know what you’re about when moving work to the cloud."

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