Nomencloudture

Jon on Tech writes about how “The Cloud” is a crock of—well, actually, I’m specifically prohibited from using that kind of language in this blog.

And, to a certain limited extent, he’s right.  “Cloud computing” has been defined and redefined to be almost meaningless.  Anything you can refer to as “the cloud” also has other names elsewhere.  SAAS, Social Networking, Storage – they’re all just big data centers with virtualization.  Skype, OpenID, Google Maps mashups – that’s just all distributed computing.

“Shock! Horror! It’s starting to sound like The Cloud is just another word for The Internet”

Well, yeah.

Cloud computing is taking hardware and applications which used to run on internal networks and accessing them via the public Internet.  So, in many ways, cloud computing is the Internet.  I don’t think it would be wrong if you exchanged the term “Internet computing” for “cloud computing” in every instance.

So, why do we still use the term “Cloud Computing?”

I think it has to do more with psychology than with technology.  Yes, “Cloud” is a buzzword, but it’s a buzzword that arose in competition with another buzzword: “Internet.”

And that is, there are a lot of people in position to make technical strategy decisions who are afraid of technology – or at least, afraid of what technology means for their business.  For most of the late 1990s and early 2000, the Internet was, if anything, more of a harm to the business than anything else.  First, there was the lost productivity of people surfing on the Internet when they should be working.  And the rise of the Internet also saw the rise in malware, malicious hacking, and the expensive computer security measures designed to counter it.  To paraphrase Dr. McCoy: “[The Internet] is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.”

So the idea that someone would possibly put out their company confidential information, their business contacts, and their mission critical applications out on the Internet sends shivers up the spines of people grown accustomed to associating the Internet with unnecessary risk.  And cat pictures.

So another name was established to explain the benefits of putting business needs out on the Internet.  Something nice and fluffy.  “The Cloud.”  Let’s face it, when people use Facebook or Twitter at home, they don’t think of it as “cloud computing.”  They just view it as “The Internet.”  “The Cloud,” if you’re going to define it, is the word that business prefers to call the Internet.

It’s a way of making the unfamiliar, familiar.  By calling the Internet “the Cloud” in a business environment, one immediately knows that one is talking about business when using those terms.  It’s the same reason that “money we owe other people” is “Accounts Payable,” and “money other people owe us” is “Accounts Receivable.”

Not that this has made the problems go away.  One of the reasons it’s called the cloud is because of the lack of visibility and control – an amorphous nature that is vapor-thin.  One in which visibility is difficult, if not impossible – at least, for the most part, until monitoring toolsfor the cloud are fully developed and implemented.

You could talk a little bit about “public cloud” versus “private cloud,” the latter term more often associated with virtualized servers in a datacenter environment – but even then you’re talking about concepts akin to “company Intranet.”  Perhaps you’re bringing in a model of service “chargebacks” for computing resources, even internally (with costs on paper) but that model was around since the mainframe era.

So, we’re probably going to continue using the term “The Cloud” when “The Internet” would be just as accurate.  It’s the term that business seems to prefer, and if it means making a few people more comfortable in this strange new century, it’s worth it.