Tuesday, 02 February 2010 17:30

In conjunction with last month’s article on “cloud computing” it seemed it would be helpful to present some of the new terms associated with the technology. The cloud community will continue to refine these definitions, but for now here they are.

Cloud provider - Any company that creates a cloud computing environment, including storage, software, and other resources, and makes it available to users over the Internet is a cloud provider. The connotation is also that the cloud services are provided via a public cloud rather than a private cloud.

Private cloud - Private clouds are also sometime referred to as “internal clouds”. A private cloud occurs when a company sets up and manages a cloud-like IT environment running on its own equipment, thereby enabling it to offer cloud services internally, to its own company, and typically not to any other organization or individual.

Public cloud - In contrast to a private cloud, a public cloud is available (usually on a pay-per-use type of service for businesses) for use by the general public.

Cloudburst  - One of the more clever cloud puns in the cloud computing world, a cloudburst is any disruption in data availability that originates with the cloud service provider, such as power loss, a security breach, or a spike in demand that crashes a provider’s servers

Cloudstorming - Cloudstorming occurs whenever more than one cloud computing environments connect. Although “storming” tends to have a negative connotation, in this case it’s a positive event as in “brainstorming”.

< Prev		Next >