What is Really New About the Cloud?

It seems like everyone these days is talking about “the cloud” -- what it is, who needs it, why it’s so great -- all the hype can be really overwhelming. In a recent article for ReadWrite Cloud, Standing Cloud CEO Dave Jilk illuminates the current the buzz around “the cloud” and the various types of cloud computing.

You can read the full article on Cloud Computing Journal’s website, but for now, here’s some of what he had to say:

So what is all the fuss about?

The advent of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) with Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering suddenly made it vastly cheaper and easier for anyone to provision a system in the cloud.

While software-as-a-service (SaaS) is not new and has always operated "in the cloud," the ubiquity of web browsers, broadband Internet and Wi-Fi has made them more responsive and easier to access.

So it’s not really the cloud that's new. It is the ease, convenience and value of using the cloud that has vastly improved. There was real innovation involved in making that possible: for IaaS, the virtualization and orchestration technologies; for SaaS, progressively improving connectivity along with more interactive browser technologies.

In the remainder of the article Jilk extrapolates on the improvements in SaaS and IaaS that have contributed to the buzz about cloud computing. Finally he ties it all together, illustrating the fact that, while these concepts and capabilities are nothing new, innovative minds have modified the way we access the cloud and forward thinking users have hopped on board and started spreading the word.

For more details on SaaS and IaaS innovations, check out the full article here.