Cloud Computing vs. Cloud Services

The Endpoint Imperative: Global Security Compliance. Are you ready?

By G C Network | November 12, 2017

    China has its Cybersecurity Law. Next May, the General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR –goes into effect for the European Union. Research shows most organizations just aren’t…

The Endpoint Imperative: IT Spending: Setting Priorities in a Volatile World

By G C Network | November 5, 2017

  Fast-evolving trends are changing the way IT thinks about security. To stay secure and productive, IT operations must excel at the fundamentals: PC refreshes for security, and optimizing end-user…

Top 1000 Tech Bloggers

By G C Network | October 24, 2017

The Rise “Top 1000 Tech Bloggers” leaderboard recognizes the most inspiring Tech journalists and bloggers active on social media. They use Klout scores (50%) and the blogger’s twitter conversations on…

IBM – The Power of Cloud Brokerage

By G C Network | October 14, 2017

Hybrid cloud adoption is now mainstream and you are making decisions every day about how to transform application and infrastructure architectures, service delivery, DevOps, production operations and governance. With Cloud…

More SMB Love Needed

By G C Network | September 29, 2017

    In a recent post, titled “10 Surprising Facts About Cloud Computing and What It Really Is”, Zac Johnson highlighted some interesting facts about cloud computing in the SMB…

ATMs Are IT Too!

By G C Network | September 5, 2017

That world of homogenous IT technology managed entirely by the internal IT organization has long disappeared.  Operations today require efficient and global management of technologically heterogeneous environments. The challenges and…

Digital Transformation Asset Management

By G C Network | August 30, 2017

Today’s businesses run in the virtual world. From virtual machines to chatbots to Bitcoin, physical has become last century’s modus operandi.  Dealing with this type of change in business even…

The Game of Clouds 2017

By G C Network | July 30, 2017

The AWS Marketplace is growing at breakneck speed, with 40% more listings than last year! This and more insights were revealed when CloudEndure used their custom tool to quickly scan the…

Managing Your Hybrid Cloud

By G C Network | July 14, 2017

Photo credit: Shutterstock   Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology industry crisis.  Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and misleading marketplace hype have made “Transformation” a dirty word. …

American Airlines Adopts Public Cloud Computing

By G C Network | June 30, 2017

Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the…

In September, Frank Gens provided an excellent overview of the the new “Cloud Computing Era”. In preparing for an upcoming talk, I re-read the post and found myself appreciating it even more. His description of “cloud computing” and “cloud services” really highlights the difference between the commercial cloud computing market and the Federal cloud computing market.

(Paraphrased from Frank Gens’ article)

When people talk about “cloud computing”, they are usually referring to things like software-as-a-service (SaaS) and storage or server capacity as a service. They may also talk about the many “non-IT” business and consumer services like shopping, banking, selling, collaborating, communicating and being entertained. In reality, these things represent an on-line delivery and consumption model for business and consumer services. These users are not explicitly buying “cloud computing”, but the “cloud services” that are enabled by cloud computing environments. Cloud computing is actually the emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model that enables real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet.

Federal government customers do use the Internet, but the vast majority of their business is done using private internets. In the DoD, for instance, we call these private networks NIPRnet, SIPRnet and JWICS. These customers are, however, very interested in learning about how emerging cloud computing models can be used within and between all of these networks.

The epiphany here is that, for the most part, the commercial cloud computing market is about making money providing cloud services while the Federal marketplace is about making money helping Federal customers design and build cloud computing infrastructures.

I may be oversimplifying this, but I welcome your thoughts.

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

G C Network

3 Comments

  1. Sam Johnston on November 26, 2008 at 11:29 am

    Hi Kevin,

    You’ve touched on a number of different points here, but the gist of the story is that cloud computing is somehow different from cloud services. I would say that cloud services are in fact one type of cloud computing (ie services that just ‘exist’ like a skyhook), and that infrastructure, storage, platforms, applications and clients are others (as I have documented at wikipedia).

    Note that while carefully slicing and dicing through the cloud computing space I’ve tried to create useful partitions between segments both by attacking it academically (what functions are required in a complete cloud architecture?) as well as through trial and error (a hardware segment doesn’t really make sense for example).

    Anyway if there is a line to be drawn then there should be some value in drawing it. I don’t see why the fed should benefit any less from other segments, nor why they would be inordinately more interested in infrastructure.

    Thanks for your efforts with this blog btw, makes for an interesting read.

    Cheers,

    Sam



  2. CloudComputingExpert on December 25, 2008 at 10:08 pm

    Kevin,

    How about moving all your posts to a real domain website like cloudczar.com?

    Just a thought to get your articles more visible.

    Good reading.
    Thanks and have a good X-Mas
    Chris



  3. RIAZ UDDIN on March 1, 2013 at 9:11 am

    Awesome Blogging! Thanks to share like this valuable Information with us. Do you need Cloud Services? We are a Virtual IT MSP Company Specializing in Technology Services that allow Individuals, Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses to simplify IT. We can help you more. You can contact with us.