Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it. The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions. Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.

Yesterday, I had an enjoyable late evening conversation with a colleague of mine, a first-class information security and compliance consultant. We have collaborated on several projects in the past, and it always is a pleasure working with him (contact if you need one). One of the issues we discussed is why so many companies feel their infrastructure costs - both data centre and cloud - are too high. Of course, "

Having looked at the definition (and misapplication) of cloud, its key characteristics, and the various categories of cloud services, or fill-in-the-blank-as-a-service (*aaS), we now turn our attention to the important difference between true cloud services and hosting services that are marketed as cloud. This is crucially important to vendors and customers! While it may seem, at first glance, as nitpicking, these are very important differences. They will impact a vendor's short-term and long-term profitability, viability and responsiveness, and a customer's ability to rely on a vendor.

Cloud seems to be the biggest buzzword in the last few years. Every technology provider, every services provider, if they aren't natively "in the cloud", they are providing a version of their offering "in the cloud." Although the term "cloud" seems pretty clear to marketers - personally, I am convinced many believe it means, "we can charge more for this if we slap the word 'Cloud' on it" - the majority of people with whom I speak, from engineers and support staff through executives, CEOs and especially customers, do not have a real understanding of what the cloud is, and why it matters.