Get your head out of your aaS: The truth behind "Cloud" and marketing

Everyone’s favorite phrase now is “Cloud is just a marketing term, what you mean is IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, etc.” but I strongly disagree.  If anything all of the “aaS” are the marketing terms and the Cloud is the technical term.  Stick with me and I’ll explain why…
 

"Cloud" is a technical term

When studying for my CCNA in 2002 we often came across an icon that looked similar to the picture on the right.  For about a week folks were so baffled by what the “cloud” was.  It represented anything not on the network.  It could be the internet, and ISP, or some other infrastructure which couldn’t be defined because we had no visibility into the environment.

At this point Cloud was a TECHNICAL term.  Once we understood that whatever was in the “Cloud” could be anything we moved on to learning more important things.  “Cloud” represented everything we were not directly responsible for or what we also called “AMP” (ain’t my problem).

I agree and accept that the "Cloud Computing" (IaaS) concept has been around since the 1950's and it was then called "time-sharing" on mainframe computers.  Mainframe time-sharing is similar to cloud computing but they were not the same technically.  These mainframes lived onsite or nearby and where physically shared either by workstations/users where now resources are logically shared and are off the local network.  This was not in the "Cloud".  The comparison should really be between time-sharing and virtualization.  Virtualization is what has made IaaS possible.

Back to the future

Fast forward to present day and what’s changed?  Not much.  The cloud is still the same, we just use it differently and it is more widespread.  Instead of just being network infrastructure for which we aren’t responsible, it could be computing, software, or everything our businesses are built on.  To me the cloud is still a technical term, albeit a very vague and all encompassing technical term, but that was the original intent for the term.  In actuality all of the “PaaS, IaaS, UCaaS, DRaaS, etc are the marketing terms.  

I don’t have a problem with marketing.  I believe it plays an important role in taking complex ideas and breaking them down into bite sized information the majority of folks can understand.  Since the cloud is vague “as originally intended” we need easy to remember buzz words to help us define different aspects and uses of the cloud.

So I beg you, please stop being “that guy/girl” on forums who feels the need to point out the “Cloud” is just a meaningless marketing term used to describe technology used in the 1950's, you are wrong.