From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 17

Internet to transmit data and applications, they also make use of private
networks that may be linked to the Internet but are separate from it and
accessible to only a fraction of users. Moreover, since cloud computing
also involves the customized provision of applications and services, it is
generally considered to be more than a network of networks. Although
the cloud as a deining concept may eventually withdraw into the power-
ful banality of technologies like electricity, most agree that it has not yet
reached the sweet spot of generic universality (Linthicum 2013e).
As of 2013, years after cloud computing began to circulate in public
discourse and well after the irst mass advertising, including two commer-
cials that aired during the 2011 Super Bowl, Americans remained unclear
about what it means. A survey of 1,000 adults carried out in August 2012
suggested that few people had even a rough idea of what cloud computing
means. Nevertheless, most indicated that they expect to be working “in
the cloud” in the future and, when they had it explained, demonstrated
savvy in understanding its potential problems—primarily price, security,
and privacy ( Forbes 2012).
When the U.S. government decided that cloud computing might be
a cost-effective way to deliver services, it pushed departments to consider
a move to the cloud. However, when department heads expressed little
knowledge of cloud computing, the government's chief information ofi-
cer asked the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to
come up with a deinition and description (Regalado 2011). So the clos-
est we have to a generally accepted formal deinition is, in the words of a
NIST report, “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on demand
network access to a shared pool of conigurable computing resources (e.g.,
networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly
provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service pro-
vider interaction” (Mell and Grance 2011). To put it in plainer language,
cloud computing involves the storage, processing, and distribution of data,
applications, and services for individuals and organizations. It is gener-
ally viewed as the fastest-growing, or near the fastest-growing, segment
of the IT sector, even though in 2012 it represented only 3 percent of all
IT spending (Butler 2012b). NIST's deinition of cloud computing has
been widely accepted throughout the industry as an objective description
of the service. But it is important to understand that cloud-computing
descriptions, however objective in appearance, are typically conlated with