Why Cloud is Different

When I first started working on Cloud Services, my wife was a little confused about what Cloud Services were. She was seeing “Cloud” in the traditional sense and couldn’t work out what meteorological phenomenon had to do with IT – were these services running on aeroplanes, or based in space or something? I explained to her that it just about using services from somebody else’s datacentre – cloud was just a metaphor for an amorphous blob of IT resources. Except, whilst it may be a humorous story, it isn’t quite true. Yes, you are using services from somebody else’s datacentre, and whilst these datacentres are state of the art, at the end of the day, they are just datacentres full of servers, storage, connectivity, security systems and so forth – nothing terribly unexpected. What is different is how these resources are presented to the customer and paid for.