Overuse of the Term 'Cloud Computing' Clouds Meaning of the Tech Buzz Phrase'Cloud computing" is the latest buzz term sweeping through the information-technology industry, but it's losing whatever meaning it once had as an increasing number of companies apply the label to their wares.
The word "cloud" has been a go-to metaphor for the Internet for almost as long as the network has existed. It never made much sense -- clouds are billowing masses of condensed water vapor while the Internet is a host of connected computers -- but the Power Point set needed a graphic for their slides and clouds conveyed the sense that the Internet was intangible and bigger than the sum of its parts.
The term "cloud computing" surfaced earlier this decade, but didn't really catch on until August 2006 when Amazon.com Inc. introduced a service called Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, which allows people to run Web sites and online applications on servers that Amazon operates.
Cutting-edge technology is notoriously difficult to explain, but the term "cloud computing" has a whimsy about it that makes it instantly accessible. More importantly, the term makes one feel that it's OK not to fully understand the details: The computer processing takes place in this thing called the cloud, and as long as it works, no one really needs to know any more about what goes on there.
Soon, International Business Machines Corp., Google Inc. and others started to use the term to describe their efforts to turn vast farms of personal computers into supercomputers that academics could use to process data-intensive calculations. While slightly different from what Amazon.com offers, these services also use the Internet to access processing power on someone else's computer.
The term could have been helpful if it stayed in that niche of the IT world. But in late 2007, Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff read a BusinessWeek article about cloud computing. Not wanting to miss out, he says he put two slides that called Salesforce.com's online sales-automation software "cloud computing" into his next presentation. When Google and Salesforce.com announced in April that it was possible to share information between online software from the two companies, the press release mentioned cloud computing nine times.
With the term's meaning broadening, no one in the tech industry wanted to be left behind. These days it's hard to find a tech company that isn't pushing its own brand of cloud computing. Online software? That's cloud computing, as are services that let people store data on the Internet. Virtualization software that lets multiple applications run on a single server? That's cloud computing, too, because it makes leasing server space possible. Oracle Corp. on Monday announced a version of its database software for cloud computing. Dell Inc. recently tried to trademark the term because, the company argued, none of this would be possible without the servers it makes.
So the term has become almost meaningless, though companies continue to use it. "We're in that nutty stage," says Billy Marshall, CEO of rPath Inc., which says it makes technology that enables, you guessed it, cloud computing. "It's absolutely too broad right now."
What Employees Really Do Online
Businesses are increasingly turning to the Internet to run software. Workers are increasingly using the Internet to do, well, whatever they want.
Those are the two key findings in a study of traffic on corporate networks by Palo Alto Networks Inc. Caveat Emptor: The company's technology helps businesses identify what Internet-based applications are running on their networks, so it has a vested interest in making the Internet seem like the Wild West. The study is based on an analysis of network traffic at 60 large businesses.
Palo Alto discovered 424 different applications in use by these companies. About half of these are applications that are accessed through a Web browser but communicate with servers that a company operates, such as Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint collaboration tool or some email and instant-messaging programs. The rest are either Web-based applications or Web sites, including searching for new vendors and using Google for B2B Discovery and B2B SEO.
The most common was online video. In fact, about 10% of all network bandwidth at the businesses Palo Alto studied came from sites like YouTube, Hulu, and even Slingbox, a program that lets people watch television from their computers.
"Employees are staying entertained," says Steve Mullaney, Palo Alto's vice president of marketing. And often they're doing it without the IT department's knowledge. For example, most businesses say they have a policy against using peer-to-peer networks, which allow people to exchange files directly with one another. But the study showed that peer-to-peer software was used by employees at almost all of the companies.
