Stop The Cloud, I Want To Get Off
February 24, 2014
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Lawrence Garvin.
Here a cloud, there a cloud. Everything today is a cloud service. Except most aren’t. In September 2011, after several years of discussion and 15 drafts, the National Institute of Standards and Technology adopted a real definition of cloud computing. Since then, however, NIST’s definition has been lost in translation due in part to opportunistic vendors and marketers, aided at times by ignorant media.
NIST defined five essential characteristics of cloud services: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. Virtually no "cloud" service offered today meets all five characteristics. NIST further defined three cloud models: software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service. But all three existed in practice long before the term "cloud" ever entered the vernacular…
Consider the idea that AOL and CompuServe were SaaS providers, as were the myriad ASPs (application service providers) that sprouted around the time of the dotcom boom. Several companies have provided hosted corporate email servers for a dozen years — are they not PaaS providers? It’s been just as easy to buy a hosted "computer" for running a web server or other software fully managed by the customer. This is no different from IaaS…
Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/stop-the-cloud-i-want-to-get-off/d/d-id/1113948
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