Twinkle Twinkle Little Hard Drive.

Cloud. Pretty cool word to use when you are sitting in a room with your clients, it can give the impression that you know what you’re talking about. "Hey this guy said cloud, must be a pro". But the truth is, very few of us actually understand the fundamental meaning of what cloud computing is about and even fewer still, understands why they need it.

I haven't been in the wonder emporium of IT for all that long, about 5 years now, and I have been doing I.T consultancy for little over a year now. But even I can sense a certain uneasy atmosphere beginning to form when people say "let’s put it in the cloud" and the first question is always "Wait, how do you put it in the cloud?". The answer is then made up of what seems to be a long explanation containing words such as Hyper-V, VMware and virtualization. I'll be honest I have shadowed some consultants and sales people on the road and ended up equally as confused and frustrated as the clients they were entertaining.

I spent many hours trying to figure out what the cloud is all about. I was speaking to one of my friends last night at the pub, and he asked me "H, iCloud what’s that about?" I explained it’s a storage service etc., and he looked at me and said "So cloud, is just a hard drive that I can access on the internet?" I said well, yes and no, it’s not solely an online hard drive, it’s one of the many things that comprises the notion of what cloud computing is. We spoke for a while, as part of my explanation I even shot my mouth off and told him that this isn't a button somewhere that says "create cloud". I was wrong, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 has that button. Yes, there is a button that says create cloud. But my buddy doesn't know that. By the end of our little chat, I think he left with more questions than answers. And that made me think, rather a lot.

My explanation of what cloud is, does and how it functions in its various forms made my non-technical friend unsure if he ever even wanted to get involved in this witchcraft they call cloud.

Then it hit me. It’s not the consumers of non-technical end users that has a problem with cloud. It’s us, the I.T pro's. The reason I say that is because, when my friend asked me, "So cloud, is just a hard drive that I can access on the internet?" I should have said yes. Not to humour him, but because he's correct and it made logical sense to him. What I did with my "well technically" speech was alienate him from the cloud computing entirely, despite the fact that he uses other cloud technologies everyday via Facebook, Twitter, E bay and Amazon, but he didn't need to know that, to him cloud was a hard drive in the sky.

Truth is, cloud computing is a platform for delivering Information Technology as a service, mostly through the internet. If your idea of cloud computing falls in those guidelines, you understand cloud.

Well, that's what I think anyway.