Cloud Computing – “Whats the Buzz? - Ask, Find, Discuss about ...

[CLOUD COMPUTING – “WHATS THE BUZZ?”]Vaishali BanerjeeIn 2006 the Chief Executive of Google Inc. EricSchmidt publicly articulated the term "cloudcomputing". Ever since then a storm has beencongregating over the Silicon Valley.Technology industry companies have beenjockeying to associate themselves with clouds.Amazon.com Inc., better known for peddlingbooks online, began selling an Elastic ComputeCloud service in 2006 for programmers to rentAmazon's giant computers. Juniper NetworksInc., which made gear for transmitting data,dubbed its latest project Stratus. Yahoo Inc.,Intel Corp. and a handful of others recentlylaunched a research program calledOpenCirrus. Cricket is a game where the bowler throwsa ball towards the batsmen. An iPhone is a device that lets you callanywhere in the world. The Niagara Falls is a tourist attraction inCanada.These statements are not wrong, per se. Butthey still take you aback, don’t they? Theymiss the most important point, miss themagic, miss the crux and neglect the mostimportant differentiators. They by explainingthe subject too little, define the subject toonarrowly, and finally tell nothing that is usefulto the reader.Here’s another:Cloud computing is where you have a lot ofintelligence in the network and it’s availablefrom wherever you need to get to itWhile almost everybody in the tech industryseems to have a cloud based project or atleast are talking about the latest buzz, veryfew actually truly understand its meaning oragree upon a common definition."I have noidea what anyone is talking about," saidOracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison,when talking about cloud computing at afinancial analyst conference in September,2009. "It's really just complete gibberish.What is it?" He added: "When is this idiocygoing to stop?"Consider these statements:The main problem is that the mainstreammedia covering cloud computing has decidedthat the best way to explain the phenomenonis to make hand‐waving general statementssuch as the above example fromBusinessWeek.In its broadest sense, cloud computingdescribes something apparent to anybodywho uses the Internet: Information is storedand processed on computers somewhere else‐‐ "in the clouds" ‐‐ and brought back to your5