Cloud computing is defined as "a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet." The website says cloud computing got its name from the cloud symbol often used to represent the Internet in network diagrams.
What is cloud computing beyond that? Yankee Group's Zeus Kerravala outlines seven essential features of a cloud computing service that differentiate it from traditional hosted services:
Scalable
Virtualized
On-demand
Internet-based
Multi-tenant
SLA supported
Usage-priced
Despite the list, cloud computing means different things to different people. Many providers claim to have cloud computing services but don’t offer usage-based pricing for customers to pay as they go. Matthew Edwards, TM Forum's Cloud Services Initiative director, said: "One supplier might name things a certain way while another may use different terms for the same things -- or use the same term to mean several things. If the cloud service providers can't agree on terms, there's no way that you as a buyer can compare the services against one another to meet the needs of your company." One way or another, the industry needs to come to a consensus on the vocabulary of cloud computing in order to eliminate confusion about what cloud computing is.
Riverbed's chief scientist, Mark Day, says that a WAN manager can think about cloud computing as effectively connecting data centers to the end of the WAN.
"The difference between an enterprise WAN and private cloud is fairly small, and people are already on that blurry line,” Day said. “I think a lot of people will wake up one morning and discover they used to think of themselves as enterprise WAN managers and now [see themselves as] private cloud managers, and very little of what they do will change. To be fair, I wouldn't call it a simple re-labeling, but the distance between them is not as great as people think."
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