Chuck's Blog

Private Clouds Vs. "aaS" Models

I love to watch how concepts evolve in our industry.

For example, the vendor and analyst community have now standardized (sort of) on certain taxonomies and hierarchies to describe different types of clouds.

My personal favorite comes from The451 "The Cloud Codex" -- it does a great job of putting all the cloudy concepts into a neat, nice and utterly pragmatic hierachy.  Unfortunately, it's copyrighted, so you'll have to contact them if you want a copy.

But they're not the only taxonomy in town.  A number of vendors and a few analysts have gone in a different direction, and decided to describe the enterprise IT cloud world in term of "aaS" -- infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and so on.

This sort of taxonomy is resulting in the inevitable question -- what's the relationship between private clouds and these "aaS" models?

And the answer is simple -- in one sense, I can make a strong case that private clouds are a superset of each and every "aaS" model you've ever heard of.

I Want My Personal Cloud

Storagezilla got this one going, and it's a thought that's worth exploring.

So much of the cloud discussion is pointed at businesses -- what about us as individuals?

And -- yes -- there's a potential type of cloud that I think we'll all want.

A personal information cloud.