A Practical Definition of Cloud

There’s the NIST definition of cloud (PDF)—or, as they call it, “cloud computing” (this post explains why I don’t use “computing”). And I have also offered up my own definition:

Cloud is a system where users acquire and manage technology resources on their own while the owners of those resources still maintain control of them.

Whether you like mine or not, I think these two definitions offer nice book-ends: NIST’s is technical, and mine is conceptual.

But neither is practical, though NIST gets closer than I do. What I mean by this is that, if you want to try to figure out whether cloud is the right model for a particular purpose, you need a definition of cloud that you can apply to that purpose to show the costs and benefits in measurable ways. Conceptual definitions won’t do that at all.

NIST’s technical definition of cloud has the right components. But it also has too many options listed. So I suggest cutting it down to the essential characteristics of cloud:

On-demand (available in an automated fashion; no posted closing hours)
Self-service (by human or machine)
Metered
Charged or shown back

If you have all four, you have cloud. They form a nice pair of couples. The first two are the technical benefit of cloud: resource use driven directly by the user. And the last two are the technical counterweights required to keep cloud manageable: seeing what users are doing, and enabling accountability.

Next, what I left out.

Follow Guy Currier, one of Dell’s subject matter experts on cloud, on Twitter: @GuyCatDell.

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Ana Cantu

Managing Editor at Dell

Ana Cantu is Tech Page One’s managing editor for business content. Before joining Dell as a blogger and social media manager, she was a multimedia journalist, and was a member of the Los Angeles Times team awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting. She is one of the company’s subject matter experts in cloud computing and data management.