When you talk about the “Cloud” what do you mean?
The Cloud is an approach to deploying IT resources (Compute, Storage, Network etc.) that abstracts the functional capacity from the infrastructure that delivers it. What this means in practice, is that applications can be deployed using resources from a Cloud without any knowledge of the physical specifications or location of the infrastructure that support it.
Cloud resources are provided as a service and are provided to the customer based on a “Service Level” as defined in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that defines the characters of the resource. Common characteristics defined in Service include: Uptime, Geographic Availability, Replication, Burst Capacity, Number of Copies, IOPs, Concurrent Sessions etc.
Although the term “Cloud” was originally used to refer to the services provided by companies like Amazon and Microsoft across the Public Internet, Clouds can be deployed in several different contexts to meet the varied needs of today’s business clients. Recent years have seen organizations deploying “Private Clouds” that keep their data separate from that of the general public but continue to provide the flexibility of a Cloud deployment model. The rise of the Private Cloud has also accelerated the rise of the “Utility Computing” Model. Co-location and Managed Hosting providers have developed services where they will Build, Manage and Host Private Clouds for companies out of their data centers. This relieves the client companies of the expense and effort necessary to support the infrastructure, allowing them to focus their IT resources on their core business applications.