Dev.SN

Migration to Cloud? Just marketing buzz or useful?

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday March 25 2014, @11:23AM   
from the SoylentCloud-SoylentBI dept.

microtodd writes:

In the wake of Cisco's announcement of entering the cloud market, there are several business case analyses that provide insight into whether the cloud is a good thing or not. Of course there are always competing factors between management and IT, which usually boils down to short-term vs long-term cost and financials vs technicals. What do the Soylenters think? Is the cost savings worth the security risks? Are the technical benefits of reliability worth delegating some administrative control?

• Origin of the term Origin of the term (Score: 2) by dotdotdot on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:59PM

  by dotdotdot (858) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:59PM (#21055)

  From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

  The origin of the term cloud computing is unclear, although it is often attributed to the Internet Systems Division of Compaq Computer (George Favaloro, Philip Reagan, Jeff Whatcott, Ken Evans, Ricardo Cidale, and others). The expression cloud is commonly used in science to describe a large agglomeration of objects that visually appear from a distance as a cloud and describes any set of things whose details are not inspected further in a given context.

  In analogy to above usage the word cloud was used as a metaphor for the Internet and a standardized cloud-like shape was used to denote a network on telephony schematics and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams. The cloud symbol was used to represent the Internet as early as 1994, in which servers were then shown connected to, but external to, the cloud.

  References to cloud computing in its modern sense can be found as early as 1996, with the earliest known mention to be found in a Compaq internal document.

  The term became popular after Amazon.com introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006.

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• Re:Origin of the term (Score: 3, Informative) by trimtab on Tuesday March 25 2014, @01:34PM

  by trimtab (2194) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @01:34PM (#21083)

  Umm. We were all drawing "clouds" on whiteboards in the 80s to represent "networks that had access, but were undefined" at meetings. Some marketing guy must have seen a whiteboard. ;-)

  "Cloud" is pure marketing. It allows the customer to define it as "what they want" in their own head. It's purposely vague. In reality, it is just a re-marketing of "client/server computing" with virtual machines.

  Sun was doing "the network is the computer" almost 25 years ago. The difference now is a better network and virtual machines.

  Parent