What is the Cloud?

Posted by Margaret on March 18, 2010

I’m just returning from the Cloud Connect show in Santa Clara, California, where every possible cloud-related product, technology and vision was on display in the expo. In the sessions, academics, industry pundits and end users bantered over the definition of the cloud, when to go to the cloud and what value the cloud brings to the enterprise.

As I tweeted on Day 2, it’s clear that no one has a clear definition of what the cloud is and what is isn’t. This is a topic near and dear to us at Hubspan, since we were in the “cloud” before it was called the cloud.  (In fact, we’re thinking of re-writing the classic Barbara Mandrell song “I was country before country was cool” with “I was cloud before cloud was cool”).

Back in 2000, we built a Net-native platform to handle business-to-business integration. We chose this architecture to enable us to provide the ease of scalability, interoperability and community we felt was required for b2b integration.  At the time, these were all things traditional B2B vendors, like EDI VANs, did not have.  The cloud allowed us to offer one-to-many connections, with our customers needing to just connect to the Hubspan platform once and receiving information exchange, closer collaboration and real-time messaging with partners, suppliers and customers.

Before I define the cloud, I want to first stress that the “cloud” or any number of “as a Service” solutions (be it SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS) is not a thing or a market or a solution.  The cloud is a delivery or consumption model.  A company needs any solution to solve a business or technical challenge, such as customer relationship management or storage or integration, and then the company can look at whether to consume that solution with an on-premise product a cloud-based solution or some combination of the two (you know, the dreaded “hybrid” approach, which is something many companies have been doing for years, only they didn’t know there was a cool definition for it).

So, in my opinion, a true cloud solution:

• Is built on, deployed to and easily accessible via the Internet (may seem obvious, but often this fact gets missed)  
• Has a single-instance, multi-tenant architecture
• Does not require any on-premise software or hardware
• Provides a pay-for-what-you-consume pricing model
• Has inherent elasticity and extensibility
• Has inherent community and interoperability (although this seems to be an issue with some of the PaaS solutions) 
• Offers seamless, on-demand scalability (up or down)
• Provides fast deployment

I do not believe a “hosted” instance is a cloud-based solution. Someone may host a solution and manage it for you, but typically, these are not true cloud solutions with the benefits and characteristics noted above.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Cloud Connect event, Hubspan, SaaS

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1. [...] components make true cloud computing.My colleagues and I have also done several presentations and blogs on cloud platforms and trying to provide simple definitions and overviews of what the cloud is and [...]

   Pingback by Defining Public versus Private Clouds - Hubspan — June 16, 2010 @ 1:08 pm

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