The beautiful dichotomy of “The Cloud” is its omnipresence and its invisibility. It is all around us, we use it every day, for almost everything, some use it every few hours or minutes, others constantly. Yet we don’t know what it is, cannot describe it, cannot sense it and we wouldn’t know it if it walked up and smacked us in the face.
So it’s no surprise there are many misconceptions of what Cloud is, but despite what others may tell you including the media, the internet or vendors, Cloud is NOT:
A single place: The aforementioned ubiquitous nature of the Cloud is its most mystifying feature. It is everywhere and it is nowhere… at least no one place. It is a vast Global network of “places” or datacenters – unmarked, non-descript, structures, heavily fortified, intensely monitored, unseen by most, privileged only to few, with racks upon racks of server, storage and network gear; and that’s just the physical! There is an entire logical layer that exists only in software, a gazillion lines of code, a virtual abomination of 1’s and 0’s. This is the secret sauce that seamlessly whips all that global gear into a sweet, ethereal, gargantuan Apple Pie of resources and anyone can buy a slice of any size, anywhere, for any amount of time. Yum!
A Virtualization Platform: While Virtualization is certainly a component of Cloud, it is not the whole story. There is an entirely separate Software Defined control layer that provides the orchestration, automation and harmonious operation of the Cloud’s core tenets: Compute, Storage and Network. Hearkening back to our official definition, a Cloud must offer limitless capacity, rapid elasticity and on-demand self-service. Virtualization does none of the above.
Remote Hosting: Many hosting vendors have hopped onto the Cloud band wagon, shamelessly marketing their floor space as Cloud services. “Put your systems in ‘Our Cloud’ they say, where its ultra-safe and we’ll take care of all of the physical facility, security, infrastructure, management and monitoring. Once again referring to our official definition, we see that because offsite hosting does not provide any more capacity than you had on premise (ergo not limitless) nor resource pooling, nor broad network access, it does not pass muster to be considered Cloud. This was once called Co-location… and still should be.
Online storage for Data & Media: There are still some antiquated online articles floating out there in the ether, which define Cloud as online storage. That’s so 2012! With the exponential expansion of Cloud’s feature sets, it is borderline sacrilege to reduce Cloud to just a place for storing photos and videos of your kids, pets, family vacations or an always available copy of your resume. Granted the genesis of Cloud was massive online storage but we have moved quite far and away from Cloud 1.0 to on-demand Compute elasticity, Streaming Media, Content Delivery, Online & Mobile Gaming, Serverless Computing, Big Data Processing, and Disaster Recovery, just to name a few. So online storage is a Use Case for Cloud, not the Cloud in and of itself.
A Social Media platform: This one takes the cake. In the same vein as the above point, Social Media is a very large consumer of Cloud computing leveraging its broad network access to deliver functionality across a variety of end user platforms – mobile, desktop, tablet, smart watch, set-top boxes and smart TV’s. But as mentioned before, these are all use cases for Cloud, not the definition of it.
The overarching theme here is that because Cloud is so heavily leveraged for such a wide array of applications and platforms, its Use Cases are easily conflated as the Cloud itself. For a clear and precise definition see our earlier "What Cloud is" blog post. With its state-of-the-art global infrastructure, inherent disaster-resiliency and cost-effective pricing model, Cloud has the potential to do anything and be anything. In essence, Cloud is what YOU make it. Contact BreezeIT today, tell us where you want go with Cloud or let us help you figure that out.
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