There’s a new-ish term that I’ve been hearing a lot of lately: Cloudwashing. Have a product that has nothing to do with Cloud? Need to make it sound fresh? Just say it enables Cloud! I’ll take this a step further, though. There are a lot of vendors out there that are talking about cloud, but in my opinion, a great many of them are really using it as a verb:
- Cloud the issue
- Cloud the truth
- Cloud the judgment
- Cloud a decision
Here’s an interesting challenge—the next time you’re talking with a vendor about cloud, why not ask them for their definition of just what cloud is? Any vendor that can’t—or won’t—answer that question is likely hiding something.
The reality is that while there may be an actual definition for the term, each organization’s perspective does allow some flexibility on what it means to really be “in the cloud.”
Here at CloudBolt, the formula is pretty simple. For years we’ve see vendors tout that their ability to enable private cloud in your environment. The truth is that very few of those pricey technologies really accomplished that. Why? Because those technologies did nothing to make internal resources more consumable. If you have technology that your end users cannot directly request and consume at some level, with accountability, you may have great virtualization, but you don’t have a real cloud.
Our path is to make the resources visible, make the resources consumable, apply a generous helping of accountability and reporting, and start really recognizing the value offered by driving out costs from your environment. When it comes to IT resources, it feels like vendors forget the S in IaaS. Without the service, you just have Infrastructure. And that's no different than how this has been done for decades.
