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Yet another ‘what is the cloud’ definition

Last week, I was having lunch with a business associate.  He does a lot of work with many IT vendors and the Federal government, and hears "we want help with the cloud" on a regular basis.  However, he was still trying to wrap his head around what "the cloud" was.  The problem is that everyone has their own definition, and (of course) it's tailored to whatever it is they do.  Even if it means jamming a square peg in a round hole. Everyone is claiming they have a cloud solution (even if it's a "wolf in sheep's clothing" scenario) and if you try and go to someone like NIST, their definition can make your head spin.

So here is what I told him.  And I did warn him that this was very, very simplified, but I think it was enough to get him to start understanding why "Cloud" is different from what has been done before.

In my mind, cloud computing is the old outsourced hosting, or ASP (Application Service Provider) model, but with a twist.  The twist is the self service piece.  The idea is that the user, who is somewhat tech savvy, and knows what end result they want, are able to get what they need without ever picking up a phone, sending an email, or opening a service desk ticket.  The user requests a service, app, or virtual machine, one is provided rather quickly, and the user is billed (or department charged).  When the user is done with the resource, it is either taken away (on a schedule) or the user initiates the process, again with no other human involvement.

That's it.  Yes, I'm sure the "cloud faithful" will howl that there is much more to it than that.  And they would be right, but the folks my business associate and I work with are not comfortable with the idea of the public cloud, nor are they at the point to discuss things like 'cloud-bursting' and 'micro-cloud' but they do know managed services.  And this allows them to make the connection between something that is known and comfortable to something very convoluted and over-hyped.