Clouds and More Clouds

Lately, just about every technology company is talking about “The Cloud” in one form or another.  The term is used on financial shows, local news reports, and I get questions about it regularly in the most common of settings.  What started out as a buzzword to describe the abstraction of Internet services has now become mainstream.

Public clouds.  Private clouds.  Community clouds.  Hybrid clouds.  Clouds and more clouds.  For those of us that remember ear-shattering, room-sized servers that threw off what seemed like the equivalent of the heat of the Sun… and the “dumb” terminals that connected to them, it feels a lot like “what goes around comes around”.  Or, as you’ve heard the saying – “eventually, everything comes back into style”.

Now, the Cloud’s the Thing.  It’s hip to build your business against the Cloud.  It’s even hipper to be a “Cloud Provider” – providing a cloud infrastructure to which others build their business against.  These beloved clouds seem to be everywhere.  And, the services that are available are ubiquitous:  Cloud infrastructure, Cloud storage, Cloud collaboration, Cloud backup and disaster recovery.  And, even – Cloud engineering.

It’s simple, really.  Picture a general telephone infrastructure or an electricity grid.  Now consider the Internet as a similar “service” running in a similar infrastructure.  That’s the Cloud.  And everything we do with that Cloud is up for grabs whether it be public or private.  Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Rackspace, Dell, Evernote, Dropbox, Box.net, and SoundCloud are trying to change how we create, move, organize and save our personal and business data atop this infrastructure.

Simply said, as Microsoft has tagged: “To The Cloud!”.  I don’t recall “To The Floppy Disk!” or “To The Hard Drive!”, but, again, the Cloud has just got this star quality about it.  People have latched on to the term and it’s catchy.

So catchy, in fact, that some startups are, according to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, creating or redefining multi-billion-dollar industries.  Industries that are formed around the Cloud.  Or, more correctly – “in the Cloud”.  Now, everyone, “To the Cloud!”

It just sounds cool, doesn’t it?