Lifecycle: Cloud

Cloud computing simply represents an evolution of activities

Cloud computing is a marketing term used to both describe and mask a real change that was first predicted in Parkhill's 1966 book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility.¹³

Parkhill asserted that in the future, computing would be provided in the same manner as electricity – through utility services. These services would be online, charged on a basis of consumption and offer an elastic supply of standardized resources from raw compute to discrete applications. His view was derived from examination of the evolution of other industries and consequently he speculated that we would see the formation of public, private, government and community computer utilities with organizations often combining several of these sources. His predictions map precisely to the modern NIST¹⁴ definition of cloud computing and the term can be considered synonymous with 'computer utility'.

An essential requirement for a computer utility is that the activity provided must have evolved to a point where it is both ubiquitous and well defined enough to support the volume operations needed for a utility. Many activities described by IT have now reached that stage – for example, the above shows the evolution of one activity, the use of computing infrastructure. It should be noted that not all IT activities are suitable for provision by computer utilities and that there is a significant difference between those activities that will be provided as computer utilities and those that will be built upon them.

The modern-day confusion over the cloud is often associated with the wide diversity of activities being affected, the transition from one state (of products) to another (of utility services) and the lack of an obvious path for evolution. For example, whilst server infrastructure has mainly commoditized and evolved within the business ecosystem, activities such as provision of email have been commoditized in the consumer space.

• 13. D. Parkhill, The Challenge of the Computer Utility, Addison Wesley, 1966
• 14. Definition of Cloud Computing, version 15, National Institute of Science & Technology

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