AAS and the cloud

I read somewhere once a comment that the cloud was a load of aas.  Today I was reading a document that had a table that showed the US  National Institute of standards and Technology’s definition of cloud computing referenced with the type of aas applicable.

The aas (as a service) tag has become common yet I was interested to see that my home computer is considered to be “Iaas on private cloud”.  This typifies for me the trend to reclassify everything that we have done in the computing world for the last 20 years as being cloud.  I cannot agree with this nor do I agree that there is any such thing as a private cloud.  The private cloud is simply technology implemented within a company that has the characteristics of a cloud service.  It’s relationship to the cloud is roughly the same as a generators relationship to the national grid.  Only a very snobby organisation would fire up the private electricity grid when the national one goes down.

The cloud is public and different because it is pervasive touching everything , not bounded by the walls of an organisation.  It’s public nature leads us to distrust it and in corporate IT we have to protect our organisations hence we need to do something that meets our requirements in a way we consider safe.  We have to balance this with the CEO’s desire to have “Cloud” because all of his contacts and magazine subscriptions tell him this is good, thus we call our solution private cloud.

Eventually mechanisms will evolve that will allow us to trust in the security and the privacy of the cloud and the need for “private” anything will go away.  There will be just the cloud, or more likely an interlocking series of melded clouds.  At that point we will look back a realise how old fashion we were being trying to maintain a separation rather than trying to encourage safety in a public world.