Comments on: Who’s Using the Cloud and How? Who Knows.

By: Rodrigo Flores

Rodrigo Flores — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:08:24 +0000

^^^If we think of cloud as an operating model, I’m seeing great interest in the adoption among newScale’s customer base. What they want to do is to enable self-service catalog that abstracts the services IT provides, presents a clear consumption charge and reports.

These services are physical dedicated, virtual dedicated, virtual shared and externally provided by an MSP or Hosting company. This is real stuff that is operating right now.

But, this is a huge change in how IT does business so it will take a while for all moving parts to look like the nirvana vision of cloud.^^^

By: surj

surj — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:32:51 +0000

I think part of the core problem is the fact that there are so many things that can be wrapped in the term Cloud Computing. I for one do not like that SaaS is included in Cloud Conputing.

I think we need to work to a common Industry dictionary that is not wikipedia. Once we understand what we are all talking about by defining the semantics clearly, then we can speak clearly.

For me, Cloud Computing is about the *computing and storage of data* aspect NOT the Application provision aspect.

I think the two are related – SaaS and Cloud, but at the moment the blurring of the two lines causes much confusion and false claims in the industry. Something that does none of us in the industry much good.

Once the language is there , then we can do surveys with confidence.

By: Rich Miller

Rich Miller — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:35:59 +0000

You’ve almost answered this question as part of the article. ^^^The definitions for ‘cloud hosting’, ‘cloud computing’ and so forth are not yet agreed upon by the various analysts, much less the population they’re surveying.^^^

Until a more granular set of questions regarding SaaS, PaaS, IaaS are presented to the audience, and we all become comfortable with the distinctions between ‘public clouds’, private clouds and those hybrids that occur with cloud-bursting … the data’s going to mean very little. This really is a shame, because (at the moment) no one seems to have a good basis on which to make business decisions. This goes not only for the consumers of Cloud, but for the providers as well. In this period of economic pressures, it’s discouraging to think that large and small vendors alike are making their business decisions on the basis of such thin data.