By
Wedge Greene and Trevor Hayes
It Clouds My Mind
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
- Bertrand Russell
We are an industry of buzz words. To convey something new or dramatically changed, we do sometimes need a freshly created word, acronym, or repurposed word. This is because when we come up with something really new the old words don't get the message across. On the other hand, sometimes there isn't really much new at all – the new buzz words are just marketing spin. "Cloud Computing" is a term that is spreading fast with many different things all being called Cloud Computing. At first glance, Cloud Computing seems to be another recasting of the familiar – just a new marketing term that we can ignore.
"Cloud Computing is a nebulous term covering an array of technologies and services including; Grid Computing, Utility Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Storage in the Cloud and Virtualization. There is no shortage of buzzwords and definitions differ depending on who you talk to. The common theme is that computing takes place 'in the cloud' - outside of your organization's network." Craig Balding's blog.
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At first glance, Cloud Computing seems to be another recasting of the familiar – just a new marketing term that we can ignore. |
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Web successfully conjured up the image of a connected globe, with strands reaching everywhere, catching everything: a destination everyone could go to for data, images, and business portals. Portal is an example of a borrowed word: a door through which one can reach (virtually) into a myriad of businesses and services. In each of these examples something very complex, and somewhat threatening to the status quo, is given a "friendly" approachable name.
To catch on, the new thing must also provide business utility. For marketing departments, the product must eventually become something that people will pay money for, and a catchy name is useful for generating interest, the first step on a path to revenue. The Cloud offers just such a name, yet what
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On the other hand, Cloud Computing may be more substantial than this: a fresh technological concept that has found an image, and a label, that has marketing weight.
Historically, a perfect storm occurs when a catchy new business term is attached to a revolutionary technology which provides business utility and competitive advantage. The Internet was just such a name for a new thing: a bunch of computers tied together in a routed global network. The World Wide
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is it really? Galen Gruman of InfoWorld wrote: "… [the cloud] is a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software." Certainly sounds compelling to be able to turn that increasingly rare commodity, capital, into an on-demand operating expense. So is Cloud Computing just another form of outsourcing?
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