Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Defining the Cloud

As Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ashlee Vance quipped, “The ‘cloud’ refers to the amorphous, out-of-sight, out-of-mind mess of computer tasks that happen on someone else’s equipment. For the past five years or so the cloud has been hyped by companies to mean anything that happens on the Web, which is how ‘cloud computing’ came to rival ’social networking’ in overuse.”1

Although there are literally dozens or perhaps hundreds of definitions of cloud services that attempt to capture the essence of the examples just listed and Vance’s quip, one that seems to have gained traction is the definition from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), locked down after 15 iterations:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.2

Further, NIST defines five major attributes: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.

The NIST definition is quite an achievement of both semantics and compromise among a variety of constituencies. For example, it refers to “broad network access” rather than specifying a particular network technology, such as the Internet.

However, I would argue that it is semantically equivalent to a simpler definition I devised ...