cloud computing [English]

Syndetic Relationships

InterPARES Definition

n. ~ A model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. (Mell and Grance, 2011, 2)

General Notes

This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, including on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service; three service models, including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); and four deployment models, including private cloud, community cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud (Mell and Grance, 2011, 2).

Other Definitions

  • NARA FAQ Cloud Computing (†335 ): Simply defined, cloud computing is a technology that allows users to access and use shared data and computing services via the Internet or a Virtual Private Network using a scalable range of resources without having to build infrastructure to support these resources within their own environments or networks. [Refers to NIST definition.]

Citations

  • Bender 2012 (†604 p.1): Cloud computing involves use of the Internet to transmit one’s data to a remote computer, and use of the software and data storage available in that remote computer to do one’s processing and store one’s data. The theory is that, because the operator of that remote computer will have one or more large facilities processing and storing data for many clients, the operator will be able economically to have more and better application software, system maintenance expertise, and perhaps storage, than would any single client. Accordingly, so goes the theory, the user gets superior processing, storage, and scalability at a lower price. (†1394)
  • Bender 2012 (†604 p.1-2): Another definition emanates from the Cloud Legal Project at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) at Queen Mary, University of London: Cloud Computing is a way of delivering computing power to you, wherever and whenever you need it, as a utility like water or electricity. Like such a utility, it allows you to use as much or as little as you need (be it processing power or data storage)... Like a utility, the provider shares a large resource among a pool of users, allowing economy of scale and efficient sharing of demand. And like a utility, if you pay for Cloud computing services you often do so in proportion to your use, rather than a flat fee. (†1395)
  • Buyya, et al. 2009 (†587 p.599): Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are commoditized and delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services based on their requirements without regard to where the services are hosted or how they are delivered. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision and these include cluster computing, Grid computing, and more recently Cloud computing. The latter term denotes the infrastructure as a ‘‘Cloud’’ from which businesses and users are able to access applications from anywhere in the world on demand. Thus, the computing world is rapidly transforming towards developing software for millions to consume as a service, rather than to run on their individual computers. (†1183)
  • Chun 2012 (†345 ): There are plenty of definitions for "cloud computing" online, and for the most part, they generally point to the same thing: taking applications and running them on infrastructure other than your own. Companies or individuals who offload or effectively "outsource" their hardware and/or applications are running those apps "in the cloud." ¶ Saas: Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Lotus, WebFilings, Zoho, Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail . . . ¶ Google App Engine, Force.com, Windows Azure, LongJump, Rollbase, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, VM CloudFoundry . . . ¶ Amazon EC2, Rackspace, VMware, Joyent, Google Cloud Storage . . . (Source: Gartner AADI Summit Dec 2009) (†326)
  • Chun 2012 (†345 ): While the advent of contemporary computer networking happened in the mid-1970s, no talk of anything remotely resembling a concept like "cloud computing" came about until about a decade later in 1984 when John Gage of Sun Microsystems coined the memorable slogan, "The network is the computer." ¶ As prophetic as Sun was back in the day, hardware (primary compute and networking) was neither powerful nor commoditized enough to realize this vision at the time. Cloud computing was still at least a decade away. (†327)
  • Ciccatelli, 2014 (†362 ): With the expansion of the cloud space, the move by leaders to focus on cloud for future company growth, and the shortfall of reform activity to restrict patent abuse, these trolls are making their next move: to cloud computing. ¶ As patent trolls chase profits by pressuring companies to settle rather than fight the suits -- a practice President Barack Obama has publicly likened to extortion -- many are turning their attention to the cloud. As an emerging market full of complexity and potentially foggy technological definitions, cloud computing offers a huge opportunity for the hungry trolls. (†358)
  • Cloud Security Alliance 2010 (†592 p. 14): One of the tenets of Cloud Computing is the reduction of hardware and software ownership and maintenance to allow companies to focus on their core business strengths. This has clear financial and operational benefits, which must be weighed carefully against the contradictory security concerns – complicated by the fact that cloud deployments are driven by anticipated benefits, by groups who may lose track of the security ramifications. ¶ Versions of software, code updates, security practices, vulnerability profiles, intrusion attempts, and security design, are all important factors for estimating your company’s security posture. Information about who is sharing your infrastructure may be pertinent, in addition to network intrusion logs, redirection attempts and/or successes, and other logs (†1372)
  • CSA and ISACA 2012 (†742 p. 7): Cloud computing broke into the consciousness of business and technology leaders with the expectation that it would change many aspects of how technology would be acquired, managed and used. There were claims that cloud computing, as a disruptive technology, would change how enterprises would leverage information and information systems, how technology groups would acquire and support technology, and how IT departments and business units would come together to address market needs and advance strategies. Predictions rang out that chief information officers (CIOs) would evolve to become integrators of technologies, coming from within the technology organization but increasingly leveraging platforms, infrastructures and services provided through a supply chain of cloud providers. (†1713)
  • Doshi 2012 (†346 ): [Includes copies of Gartner's Hype Cycle, showing position of 'cloud computing'. 2008: Rising on "Technology trigger". 2009: Top of "Peak of Inflated Expectations". 2010: Slightly past peak. 2011: Nearly entering "Trough of Disillusionment." (†328)
  • Duranti 2013 (†408 ): There are four standard deployment models for Cloud architecture that broadly characterize the management and disposition of computational resources for service delivery . . . [public, private, community, and hybrid]. ¶ Clouds conform to one of three service models . . . [software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service]. (†481)
  • Evans 2013A (†341 ): Companies around the globe are learning that while cloud computing has many virtues, perhaps chief among them is its ability to help business leaders shift huge chunks of IT budgets away from low-value infrastructure and toward customer-facing growth and innovation. ¶ And while the creative destruction triggered by the cloud is certainly shaking things up on the tech side, the disruption and upheaval will be even more widespread in the new levels of financial freedom and flexibility that the cloud will give to companies that use it wisely. ¶ This revolution is occurring on two fronts: within the tech industry itself, as IT companies large and small look to redefine themselves around the cloud; and among the businesses that are rapidly turning to cloud solutions to help them optimize where and how they spend their IT budgets. ¶ Because whatever boundaries exist today for the cloud, we can be sure that those boundaries will be redrawn, reframed, redefined, and recast to match the relentless expansion of this technological inflection point that’s not only remaking the tech industry but the ways in which businesses view the potential of IT and the way they should invest in it. ¶ That’s the central issue: what customers are doing with cloud solutions, how they’re able to free up more funding for growth and innovation, and how they’re able to adapt more rapidly and effectively to life in our customer-driven world. ¶ We’ll begin to see the real the real creative-destruction power of the cloud unleashed when we begin to define the cloud in terms of what business customers want and need, and when we stop diddling around with inside-baseball constructs that mean little or nothing to the businesspeople who are ready to spend many tens of billions of dollars on cloud solutions that focus on and deliver business value. (†324)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.336-337): Cloud Computing enables users to access various computing resources simply, including computing cycles, storage space, programming environments and software applications (all you need is a web browser). Moreover, Cloud computing promises to provide other benefits -- Less investment: Clouds provide affordable solutions that handle peaks, or scale easily at a fraction of the traditional costs of space, time and financial investment., Scale: Cloud vendors have vast data centers full of tens of thousands of server computers, offering computing power and storage of a magnitude never before available – cloud computing promises virtually unlimited resources., Manageability: The user experience is simplified as no configuration or backup is needed. (†1217)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p. 11 (1.3 Cloud Computing Features)): Cloud computing brings a number of new features compared to other computing paradigms. . . . ·  Scalability and on-demand services Cloud computing provides resources and services for users on demand. The resources are scalable over several data centers. ·  User-centric interface Cloud interfaces are location independent and can be accesses by well established interfaces such as Web services and Internet browsers. ·  Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) Cloud computed can guarantee QoS for users in terms of hardware/CPU performance, bandwidth, and memory capacity. ·  Autonomous system The cloud computing systems are autonomous systems managed transparently to users. However, software and data inside clouds can be automatically reconfigured and consolidated to a simple platform depending on user’s needs. ·  Pricing Cloud computing does not require up-from investment. No capital expenditure is required. Users pay for services and capacity as they need them. (†1373)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 v): Cloud computing has become a great solution for providing a flexible, on-demand, and dynamically scalable computing infrastructure for many applications. Cloud computing also presents a significant technology trends, and it is already obvious that it is reshaping information technology processes and the IT marketplace. (†1224)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.3): A new style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a services over the Internet. (†1225)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.38): Huge amounts of videos, images, and documents are to be stored in data centers so that users can download and view them at any time, and they can promote interaction. Cloud computing can effectively support this kind of business requirements, and get maximal storage with limited resources. (†1182)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.66): While the purists are still debating the precise definition of cloud computing, the IT industry views cloud computing – an emerging business model – as a new way to solve today’s business challenges. A survey conducted by Oliver Wyman (Survey, private study for IBM) in November 2008 with business executives from different enterprises identified “reduce capital cost,” “reduce IT management cost,” “accelerate technology deployment,” and “accelerate business innovation” as the main business benefits for cloud computing... Despite the benefits promised by cloud computing, the IT industry also sees that significant innovation and improvement on technologies and operations governance are needed to enable broad adoption of cloud services. Chief concerns are security and performance issues. (†1222)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.339): A Cloud is essentially a class of systems that deliver IT resources to remote users as a service. The resources encompass hardware, programming environments and applications. The services provided through cloud systems can be classified into Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a service (SaaS). (†1175)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.339-340): A Cloud is essentially a class of systems that deliver IT resources to remote users as a service. The resources encompass hardware, programming environments and applications. The services provided through cloud systems can be classified into Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a service (SaaS). Different enterprises play different roles in building and using cloud systems. These roles range from cloud technology enablers (enabling the underlying technologies used to build the cloud, such as hardware technologies, Virtualization technology, web services and so on), to cloud providers (delivering their infrastructure and platform to customers), to cloud customers (using the providers’ services to improve their web applications), and users (who use the web applications, possibly unaware that it is being delivered using cloud technologies). (†1229)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p. 575-576): Cloud computing is derived from the service-centric perspective that is quickly and widely spreading on the IT world. From this perspective, all capabilities and resources of a Cloud (usually geographically distributed) are provided to users as a service, to be accessed through the Internet without any specific knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the underlying technology infrastructure that supports them. (†1399)
  • Gallagher 2014 (†554 ): It wasn’t until (relatively) cheap general-purpose server virtualization and storage networking came along that what we now call “the cloud” was really possible on a large scale. ¶ The term “cloud” comes from what networking people have referred to as large, opaque networks well before there was an Internet. Very simply, cloud computing is any service that happens somewhere hidden behind the abstraction of an application programming interface in a shared data center owned by someone else providing on-demand and self-service. (†925)
  • Gellman 2009 (†561 p. 4): The definitional borders of cloud computing are much debated today. For present purposes, cloud computing involves the sharing or storage by users of their own information on remote servers owned or operated by others and accessed through the Internet or other connections. Cloud computing services exist in many variations, including data storage sites, video sites, tax preparation sites, personal health record websites, photography websites, social networking sites, and many more. (†938)
  • Gens 2008 (†582 ): An emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet (i.e., enabling cloud services) (†1145)
  • IBM 2013 (†343 ): Cloud computing, often referred to as simply “the cloud,” is the delivery of on-demand computing resources – everything from applications to data centers – over the Internet on a pay-for-use basis. ¶ Elastic resources: scale up or down quickly and easily to meet your demand. ¶ Pay for use: metered service so you only pay for what you use. ¶ Self service: All the IT resources you need with self-service access. (†325)
  • Inofuentes 2014. (†369 ): [Western Digital's] My Cloud is a set of personal "cloud-in-a-box" products designed to not just store your stuff, but to let you take it outside of your home. ¶ Lots of the coverage for the WD My Cloud has focused on it as a Dropbox competitor, and that’s not an inept comparison. Dropbox makes backing up mobile and PC files simple and fast, so does the My Cloud. What Dropbox lacks is terabytes of accessible space; what the My Cloud lacks is the external access speeds inherent from a true cloud service. (†373)
  • ISACA Glossary (†743 s.v. cloud computing): Convenient, on‐demand network access to a shared pool of resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. (†1767)
  • Lasewicz 2013 (†329 ): They didn’t call it Cloud in 1925. It was the Tabulating Machine Service Division (TMSD) in this proposal presented to IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson, Sr. But at its core, TMSD was Cloud – the provision of data processing capability to clients who couldn’t or wouldn’t invest in building an internal data processing infrastructure. ¶ The proposal even offered the 1920s version of sending data to the Cloud … it included retaining the client’s punched cards for a year. (†307)
  • Lipkis 2013 (†339 ): If you google "personal cloud server" you'll find lots of products and how-to's ("save money by building your own personal cloud server using an old PC ..."), most of which are just server software so people can access their cat videos remotely. ¶ Looking through this stuff, I've come to the conclusion that if "cloud" has any meaning it's the ability to create and destroy machine instances on the fly and manage them effectively. (†320)
  • McLelland, et al. 2014 (†403 8-9): Although the term “the cloud” appears straightforward, the reality is that it is a single term used to describe a multitude of different services and technologies. A cloud may be implemented for a client in any of four different ways [public, private, hybrid, community]. [...] In general, the cloud service industry offers four types of services - Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and, less commonly, Data as a Service. [...] These four types of clouds and four different services can be implemented in any number of combinations, for example software being provided in cloud-based platforms through rented infrastructure. (†466)
  • Rackspace 2014 (†433 ): No matter which provider you choose, you'll find that almost every cloud has these core characteristics: · It's virtual · It's flexible and scalable · It's open (or closed) · It can be secure · It can be affordable · It can be secure and affordable. (†561)
  • Regalado 2011 (†436 ): Some accounts trace the birth of the term to 2006, when large companies such as Google and Amazon began using “cloud computing” to describe the new paradigm in which people are increasingly accessing software, computer power, and files over the Web instead of on their desktops. ¶But Technology Review tracked the coinage of the term back a decade earlier, to late 1996, and to an office park outside Houston. (†570)
  • Saidah and Abdelbaki 2014 (†739 p. .671): Cloud Computing is a new term for an old service with new features. Many of us used to have an email account during the last two decades. Data location, storage and processing are usually unknown to the user. In fact, this was a kind of Cloud service. Cloud was known as on demand infrastructure in the 90s and as Grid/Utility computing in the 2000s. Clouds and Grids are common in their vision, architecture and technology, but they differ in security, programming model, business model, compute model, data model and applications. [Citing Foster, I., Zhao, Y., Raicu, I. and Lu, S. 2008. Cloud Computing and grid computing 360-degree compared. ] (†1705)
  • Schmidt 2006 (†437 ): Schmidt: There is an emergent new model [that] starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a "cloud" somewhere. And that if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn't matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you – or new devices still to be developed – you can get access to the cloud. . . . The computation and the data and so forth are in the servers. . . . ¶What's interesting is that the two – "cloud computing and advertising – go hand-in-hand. There is a new business model that's funding all of the software innovation to allow people to have platform choice, client choice, data architectures that are interesting, solutions that are new – and that's being driven by advertising. ¶Sullivan: One of the other things you mentioned, the advertising [that] helps [Google] go out and fund all these things – search has been this huge driver. We continue to turn to search. We confess our innermost desires to it. And this week, on Monday, AOL had released a large amount of search data. And the intentions were honorable, they released the data so that researchers could see how people were searching. And they thought that they had protected the privacy of the people because they replaced all the user names with tokens or anonymous numbers. But people quickly discovered that because I could find the profile of a particular person that we could track it back. And The New York Times [published a front-page story about a woman whose identity was easily found this way] – this woman has become the poster child of search privacy. So she's kind of probably the most innocent person of some of this data that they could pick out. But it was very revealing. But it raised, this whole issue has raised all sorts of issues. Now we've had queries where you could see someone doing searches that looked like they were planning to murder their wife. You've got searches where you think people might be doing illegal stuff, and just searches that are embarrassing. (†571)
  • Strategi 2009 (†555 ): The key to understanding cloud computing is to not focus on any one definition, but to look at the common underlying attributes and characteristics of the technologies or concepts described within the definitions. ¶ To reconcile the various perspectives on cloud computing, one can think of cloud computing as a scale that measures the degree of architectural abstraction offered by a solution: as the level of abstraction increases, the less is known about the underlying implementation, or the more "cloudy" the architecture appears to be. (†926)