For years many organisations have sought savings in IT, in particular business applications costs. The trend tended to move CIO’s towards full outsourcing or managed services, many of which involved utilising resources and applications on the supplier’s infrastructure. Now more and more are investigating in virtualization, proving that the business really does not care where the applications and data is held, so long as they have service and access under the Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) they have agreed with the business and the providers (in-house IT or their suppliers). This has led to data centre and server consolidation, but it has also opened the door for more Software as a Service (SaaS) or Application Service Providers (ASP). Yet because the business still agrees and engages with IT, many believe that all their access comes from in-house architecture. Interestingly, many CIO’s appear unclear as to what the “cloud” is, how they can be users of it, often unaware that they are already are! In a recent study by IDC nearly 60 percent of European CIO’s are already using cloud services – even if they don't realise it. “About a third say they won't be using cloud computing within the next five years”, said Marianne Kolding, associate vice president, European services and software, IDC. "The results change when they're asked about specific products, however," She explained that this suggested some CIO’s weren't aware that some of the technologies they were using were actually cloud technologies.

The root of this misunderstanding appears to be that the industry, yet again, brings in a new term and paradigm into the market without a clear concise definition of it. Then, surprise surprise, every IT vendor on the planet gets their marketing team into overdrive and highlights that they have solutions that assist, operate, enable (etc etc) the “cloud” architecture, which only goes to darken the cloud.   What people don’t seem to understand is that Cloud computing has been around for ages, we all remember the infrastructure diagrams with the “cloud” drawings depicting the elements Telecom / LAN/WAN / Internet / Extranet etc, well this is how the term came to exist. It’s just a collective metaphor to encapsulate all those other terms. We can have private clouds, secure clouds, public clouds and so on, but what we need to start making clear is what type we are discussing at any one time. Just like with real clouds, we have Cirrus, Nimbus, Cirrocumulus ,Cirrostratus etc, so we need the “cloud computing” terms broken down, so we are clear which elements we are discussing and to make it clear what we are getting into (or under).

That new worldwide dictionary, Wikipedia, defines “cloud computing” like this:

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid.

It is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client–server that preceded it in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. It is a by product and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.

The term "cloud" is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from another web service or software like a web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.

So if you use Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo, you are using the cloud, if you are using on-line Banking, BACS transfers, SalesForce.com, you are in that cloud. The list goes on and on, as with the explosion of the World Wide Web (WWW), so we have the expanding of the cloud permitting the hosting of services and applications to customers. So with 60% of European CIO’s stating they use the cloud now, I would suggest that this number is much higher in reality, it’s simply that they are not clear what the cloud actually means. Let’s learn a little more and start with clearer definitions of the types of clouds!

Below are links to publication on the cloud from the TSO (The Stationery Office);

Cloud Computing, A Practical Approach

Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution: How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Can't Afford to Be Left Behind

Executive's Guide to Cloud Computing