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"Deni Connor's extensive background spans multiple IT disciplines and enables her to provide actionable feedback and thorough analyses which benefits QLogic, our global channel partners and our customers. I highly recommend SSG-NOW as a cost-effective IT consultancy that delivers high impact results."

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Cloud, schmloud, things are too loud

By Deni Connor

OK, I made the ‘schmloud’ up – blame me for combining the Yiddish schmutz (look it up) with cloud. But, then look at what all the newly found ‘cloud’ vendors are doing. What used to be companies that framed themselves as storage service providers, application service providers, managed service providers, storage as a service providers or even utility computing, are now hooking on to the new ‘cloud’ and adapting their existing and future products around it. Look at NetApp’s announcement last week of ‘cloud services’ – framing IT and the services they provide into the cloud and using NetApp gear and the company’s new operating system.

I’m frankly tired of it. Let’s just let cloud go back to being simple again – deploying and accessing storage products or services from an outsourced service provider, from the Internet or within an organization from a centralized organization.

Cloud services should explain clearly what’s happening and I’m not interested in being a cloud detractor. I’ll be the first one to admit that cloud services can be attractive to businesses’ intent on weathering this financial downturn, that salesforce.com has landed on a very successful model and that customers will be able to keep up with the latest technology advances (and, save money) if they use cloud services and applications. Cloud is being adopted by large enterprises for supplemental, non-strategic services, but has been until now more popular with small mid-size businesses and consumers alike have adopted basic data protection by using services such as Carbonite, Decho’s Mozy and MozyPro.

Let’s simplify cloud for end-user IT adopters. If I feel fuzzy about the name ‘cloud’ and what it describes, others do too. Your suggestions of a new naming convention are welcome.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 5:22 am and is filed under IT's Sto-Relevant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. // Both Comments and Pings are open ?> You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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