What is Cloud?
Had a discussion yesterday with a colleague around what is cloud, where I found us in a fairly heated discussion around what cloud actually meant, so I thought I’d write down where I’m coming from. For the consumer cloud represents a wonderful world where your data is accessible where ever you go via web based applications provided as SaaS. However enterprise appears to hijacking the term to identify how they would actually provision these services. This though only subtly different, is an incredible poor piece of marketing and doesn't do what service providers can actually offer any justice. My point is that anyone can provide a Software as a Service (SaaS) by going into Best Buy and purchasing a DL360 putting it in a data centre somewhere. That is a cloud service, granted probably a terrible one. What service providers can and should provide on top of that is resilience and scalability. One of the areas getting talked about a lot as being “cloud”, in my neck of the woods is t...