The use of the term "the Cloud" is basically for anything that's not the traditional way of requesting and utilizing IT resources (aka rigid, pre-allocated, per

The use of the term "the Cloud" is basically for anything that's not the traditional way of requesting and utilizing IT resources (aka rigid, pre-allocated, persistent and more than likely tied to physical systems). And that's probably why you're seeing so many different definitions. What I think "cloud" should mean is the combining of individual resources (computing, storage, etc.) into a large virtual pool that can be accessed and allocated dynamically. This can be done within a corporation's own set of servers and devices (private cloud) or by tapping into someone else's collection of resources (public cloud providers like Amazon, Azure, etc.).