Defining cloud computing by its characteristics

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Don Sheppard.

A definition for cloud computing, despite it having been with us for many years (some say back to the 1960s), seems to be fairly elusive. The U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) definition is perhaps the best known but it is a user-centric definition. Most recently the ISO (International Standards Organization) and the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) have jumped into this game with an emerging standard called ISO/IEC 17788 that provides a basic vocabulary and description for cloud computing.

First, two points to note:

• there is not currently, and there may never be, a single conformance statement for all of cloud computing – it is just too diverse for a single standard.
• cloud computing is really a "paradigm shift"? not a single system – there will be many forms of cloud computing system, with many different deployment patterns…

Cloud computing can be defined as the set of computing systems that have the following key characteristics:…

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