Can't Define "The Cloud"? Who Cares?

"The Cloud is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." :)

Is that a good description?

While shopping online is debatable, banking online is definetly cloud computing. Your bank stores statements, transaction logs, account information in the cloud and allows you to directly interact with such information by paying bills to other cloud entities, moving money between accounts, or depositing checks. I don't understand how this is any less cloud computing than Google docs or dropbox.

The cloud itself is fairly easy to define unless you try to muddy it. A cloud service gives you access to your data at any internet connected device as well as allowing you to edit and interact with that data from those devices and updating the data such that all devices have access to the same data.

The difference between a cloud service and a traditional internet service is that a traditional service is more like a blog or streaming sight where you only consume. Its true that cloud services existed long before cloud computing became a buzz word but the concept of the cloud computing revolution is that more and more things will be in the cloud not just the fact that it exists.

I think the question about the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the cloud was genuinely designed to test penetration. It would be similar to asking what is the first thing that comes to mind when someone says notebook. Which I'm almost willing to bet the percentage of people thinking about notebooks as computers has gone down since smart phones and tablets have progressed.

Yep, the proof that most people don't have a clue. They don't even have a clue that the "jargon term" cloud is actually a term to simplify a concept to a point where it is basically almost meaningless.

In other words "cloud" is marketing, nothing more.
The term really just means you are using a system for storage and/or computing that is not "local". The old tired term for this is just server, but "server" wasn't cool enough for the the marketing folks so they created another term.

I have a "cloud" light switch too, the power that flows through it isn't local.

Then again that is the way it should be, lots of people don't have a clue how that light gets lit when they throw the switch, so you can use any term you like, just as long as people get the idea that switch means light, and cloud means storage or computing "out there".

if its not modeled yet to calculate the "Integral of all those droplets and flying-ices", it didn't means that we couldn't use a word to talk about such existing thing.
most of times your titles have a faulty that makes that interesting, but also out of scientific point of view.

but i always thinking: what makes those droplets and other "spreading" things to gathering in a cloud-shape cloud...why they couldn't stay scattered everywhere, and instead became gathering together?

Thanks

It's important that people understand that 'the cloud' means putting stuff someplace where you can't directly control it, and where hackers seem to be increasingly be able to access it.

Online banking would seem to fit this definition. (And I do use it, but I try to monitor it for problems).

'The cloud' also refers to the latest trend of removing the actual software from our control, and having it reside in the cloud -- leaving us fairly helpless when we lose access to the net. We are also locked into whatever 'upgrades' the provider chooses to adopt.

What I'm trying to say is that it's important for folks to understand what the cloud actually is, so that they know what might be at risk when they use it.

Politian’s have spoken in cloudy terms, since the invention of the word Politian, ... Sad sigh.

Many people still don't know what the internet is. They know how to use it though, at least to some limited degree.
Email-Facebook-Video chat. That's what most people can do.
Just don't ask them to set up the webcam.

Salesmen's hype over sad, banal reality. You won't be storing your data at home anymore, but down thousands of miles of old copper telephone wires, fibre-optics and satellite links, in a shed in Bangladesh. What's that I hear you exclaim, the salesman said the company was based in Cambridge England (awfully proper don't you know!) Yeah, right...