The Wall Street Journal has a tongue-in-cheek front-page article today called, “The Internet Industry Is on a Cloud – Whatever That May Mean.” It discusses the ambiguity of the term “cloud,” makes fun of IT buzzword evolution (which I previously graphed here), and has a couple bombastic quotes from Larry Ellison. All good stuff.
Although “cloud” is a broad term, I think it does have a precise meaning. Specifically, “cloud” describes any information or technology service that is hosted remotely and delivered across the public Internet. It therefore includes Web 1.0-era companies like Hotmail, a cloud-based email service, and PayPal, a cloud-based payment service. Software-as-a-service companies are cloud, as are the new infrastructure-only services like Google’s AppEngine and Amazon’s EC2. But virtualization software running on my laptop is definitely not cloud (see definition above). Nor is browser-based software that’s delivered across a company’s private VPN from their own data center.
Sorry Larry….
