What is this "Cloud" thing - Part 1

Over the past year or so, what I gte asked about most often is: What is this "Cloud" thing?

Or it can be referred to as Cloud Computing.

In it's most basic form, Cloud indicates who is responsible for the underlying hardware.

Three variations exist:

1) Private Cloud - this is you or your company doing everything. You own the hardware, you most likely have your own computer room with equipment, or you may have even co-located the equipment offsite. But it's your responsibility. Hardware, OS, Applications, Upgrades, Failures, Air Conditioning, etc. So what IT has done for years and years, all along, is now termed "Private Cloud".

2) Public Cloud - someone else has bought truckloads of equipment, configured and loaded it with OS and applications, and has it hopefully, located in a professional co-location facility or datacenter. Most people term it as "Let someone else deal with this piece of IT..." You come along, and lease (or sometimes buy) a piece or slice of this equipment to run your business on. You have no physical access to the equpment. The outside company pays for people to maintain it, back it up, upgrade it, add more disk space, etc. You just pay for your small piece of the whole pie. For any "Older" IT people out there, it used to be called "Computer Time-Sharing". Except instead of one big system you bought computer resource time on, it is now multiple smaller systems being used as one logical big system.

3) Hybrid Cloud - this means you are using both Private and Public. You have your own equipment, just like you used to do in the past, but you also may be either actively using a Public cloud for day-to-day use, or as a backup (DR) to your Private Cloud (or vise versa).

In general - don't be afraid of the Cloud terms. It's nothing new. Its been done for years and years. Cloud is just the new fancy name for it.