A few weeks ago I presented to the New Zealand Cloud Computing Summit. My presentation was titled “An overview of applications that are currently delivered via the cloud and potential applications for the future” however, taking a look at the delegate list a few weeks before the event it became clear that the average attendee was a C-level executive with very little cloud exposure – as such definitions and explanations were the best strategy for my talk.
While my presentation isn’t going to be anything new to the vast majority of readers, in my (entirely biased) opinion, it gives a good high level look at cloud computing, with enough case studies to hopefully show the value to be gained for enterprise by dabbling in the cloud.
I would have thought that the majority of us dealing with this stuff day to day but a post over on Enterprise Advocates got me wondering whether in fact I’d been naive in thinking this way. While the post itself picks up another topic, it highlights the emergence (at least from one person) of a new term to talk about Cloud Computing. The author is using the acronym SOC to stand for SaaS/On Demand/Cloud. The term had me scratching my head – cloud is, after all, an umbrella term under which SaaS, PaaS and IaaS fall. As such, both SaaS and On Demand l accept are a subset of Cloud, but shouldn’t be used in a way that suggests substitutability of the terms. As one commenter said;
The 3 [terms] are related, but Cloud Computing covers the whole topic. I think you should drop this new acronym because we already have too many confusing terms. Most organizations are happy to talk Cloud and as a sub text explain how that covers SaaS, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service
Anyway – given the post it seems that my slideshow may, in fact, be timely. It’s been on Slideshare for a few weeks now and seems to have gained a bit of a following – either than or slideshare has had a quiet few weeks. EIther way, enjoy!
Great presentation! The “What is Cloud Computing?” animated video does an especially good job of explaining the concept to a non-technical audience. (The slight jabs it makes at Microsoft are a little behind the times since Microsoft now DOES have a cloud computing service, Windows Azure, but the video is still well done and Ben mentions Azure as well as some of the other major cloud computing service providers, Salesforce, Google and Amazon, later in his own slides.)
The case studies for cloud computing are also very compelling for IT decision-makers.