Cloud Hosting’s Identity Crisis
by Anita Campbell
Two thirds of small businesses are unaware of cloud hosting, says a recent Rackspace survey (press release here).
Actually — I’m surprised that even one third of small businesses know what cloud hosting is. When I saw the press release, I had to stop and think about it myself. It’s one of those terms that is hard to get your arms around.
Cloud computing as a general category is easier to understand. For instance, I can quickly grasp that getting access to software on a “rental” basis via the Web is cloud computing.
But cloud hosting seems redundant. I could envision any outsourced hosting arrangement where your website is on a shared server, as cloud hosting. I am not sure of the difference between a shared hosting arrnagement and cloud computing — after all, aren’t they both “in the cloud?”
Web Hosting Unleashed notes the challenge inherent in the terminology:
The latest trend-maker in the tech industry is cloud computing, a term that is struggling to find a concrete definition. Ask any IT pro to define cloud computing and you’ll get an unrefined answer punctuated by a lot of hemming and hawing. This ambiguity is expected for brand-new computing paradigms, but it makes cloud computing tougher to sell to corporate IT managers. Still, cloud computing — which is similar to grid computing, utility computing and SaaS (software-as-a-service) — is catching on …as a relatively cheap way to access enormous, highly flexible computing resources.
And therein lies a challenge for technology vendors: simplifying and de-jargonizing the message. It’s doubly hard to attract small business customers when your target market has no idea what you’re selling.
You can download the published results from the Rackspace survey here (PDF).
