The Definitive Definition of Cloud Computing?

One of the major pain I (and I’m sure many others as well) encountered while writing a paper on a topic related to cloud computing in the past few years is the general lack of consensus on the definition of cloud computing, with numerous articles, papers, and journals offering their own version of the definition. This makes the writing process unnecessary time-consuming because one has to comb through papers after papers and summaries all the definitions into an ad-hoc one that can be used in the current paper.

Fortunately, with the publishing of the NIST’s Definition of Cloud Computing, it might be safe to say that those days of having to craft your own definition of the cloud (with varying degree of quality) are behind us.

The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing is a very well written document. It is very short and concise while at the same time manages to include all the aspects that are now generally agreed upon to be the important characteristics of cloud computing. Another virtue of the NIST’s definition is that it isn’t tie to a particular technology or idea. One of the problem with many of the past definitions is that most of them are tied to the idea or technology of their respective paper, making them more or less useless outside the context of that particular paper.

Kudos to all the fine folks at NIST for making this little document. It certainly makes my life a whole lot easier.