Private Clouds: Parking Your Systems on Someone else's Cloud Doesn't Always Pay off (Trends & Tech‪)‬

I think we all know--or think we know--what cloud computing is. If you don't then you've probably been hiding in a cave with your mainframes for the last five years and fine tuning your COBOL skills. At its most basic, cloud computing is accessing services that you do not host or manage using TCP/IP. The derivation of the term is mundane--network diagrams have for years used a "cloud" symbol to represent the Internet. The term "the cloud" is now commonly used to refer to services available using the Internet--as in "our corporate e-mail is on the cloud." This translates to something like "we have outsourced management of our e-mail to a third party which hosts the mail server(s) in a data center that we access using the Internet." Based on those criteria, Google Mail, Hot Mail and Yahoo Mail are all cloud services--even though they are rarely referred to as such. Maybe the cloud only pertains to services you pay for. It's all in the marketing. Money, Money, Money