September 30, 2010 – Cloud computing, though relatively new, is becoming common on the tongues of most technological gurus. But what is “cloud” computing, and how does it differ from “hosted?” The blog Enterprise Irregulars attempts to explain this sometimes nebulous topic (pun totally intended).

Defining the practice of taking a term and using it to describe something that they do as “smash and grab semantics,” one Enterprise Irregulars author addresses the proper and improper contextual use of cloud in his post titled, “Smash and Grab Semantics: Cloud vs. Hosted”

As David Dobrin explains it, “cloud is a lot cheaper than hosted, a lot cheaper, because cloud applications or services have been engineered to share resources efficiently, something that hosted applications or services can’t do, because they’ve had to be rewritten from the ground up. So when people offer something hosted and make their customers think it’s cloud, they’re giving people the idea that they’ve done the homework and were providing the advantages of efficient resource sharing when they haven’t in fact.”

Good explanation and good point.

Melody K. Smith

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