No - I disagree. Whilst, in IT, there is much marketing BS from vendors wanting to sell you stuff, the core cloud definitions are pretty well settled IMHO. Most people use a variation of what NIST has published:
Features: * Perception of infinite capacity, with rapid elasticity (as far as the user is concerned the capacity is available on-demand) * Ability for user to perform self-service provisioning/deprovisioning (no need to involve the vendor) * Broad network access: access via widely accepted protocols (like web services) thus accessible on a variety of devices and thick/thin client models * Resource Pooling: multiple end users may be mixed together and spread across the available physical resources and fault domains * Measured service: automated monitoring and capacity management (e.g. dynamic provisioning and resource usage levelling). Also provides transparent resource (and thus cost) accounting to the end user Types: * IAAS (you get some compute, storage etc.), * PAAS (you get a platform, like SQL Server) or * SAAS (you get to use an application e.g. like SalesForce) Location: * Private (your DC), * Public (someone else's DC) and * Hybrid (in your DC, but you can expand or burst into someone else's) Just uploading some data to a DC is definitely not cloud. Most outsourcers and vendors struggle with implementing all the features unless they are building from the ground up. To build a pure cloud (and I've worked on a couple of large private ones) involves a lot of work to build the systems that automate everything, because there's a lot of stuff (provisioning, incident management) that's usually made up "on the fly" in most places. And you can't automate rules that don't exist. Cheers Ken From: Webster [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, 15 February 2013 4:41 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Backup to cloud? "The Cloud" is nothing more than someone else's data center. So yes, that is The Cloud. Thanks Webster From: Guyer, Don [mailto:[email protected]] Subject: RE: Backup to cloud? This is where the term "the cloud" becomes murky, in my opinion. If I'm sending data over a private circuit to a 3rd party data center, is that really "the cloud"? ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
