Cloud definition still cloudy?

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 21 July 2010 19:05

Business IT - Technology

Cloud is widely tipped as the next - even the current - big thing in IT. But is everyone talking about the same thing?

Speaking at CA Expo in Melbourne this week, Ajei Gopal, executive vice president of CA Technologies' development and technology group noted that analysts variously expect the public cloud market to be anything from $US55 billion to $US160 billion in the next few years. Although "we've heard this kind of hype before," Gopal said "I believe the cloud will change everything."

Everything? He predicts the shift to cloud computing will be as big a deal as the impact of mainframe computers in the 1960s, the adoption of PCs and GUIs in the 1980s, the arrival of the world wide web in the 1990s.

The adoption of cloud will bring about a fundamental change in IT management, he suggested. There will be a shift from managing individual components to managing the final service delivered by IT.

But what exactly do people mean by 'cloud'. iTWire recently published one definition (Private cloud = virtualisation + automation + self-service), CA Technologies' Andi Mann suggested that cloud computing = virtualisation management + automation + service management, while Cameron McNaught, executive general manager of Fujitsu ANZ followed up with pay per use, elastic and scalable, and self-service as the defining characteristics.

McNaught pointed out that achieving genuine elasticity and scalability can be problematic in a private cloud. In particular, software licensing is a real challenge if you want to scale up and down with demand, though the situation is "rapidly improving," he suggested. (McNaught was presumably talking about commercial software rather than FOSS.)

What about hardware? Please read on.