Open Letter to the Cloud Community

Over the past few years, there have been many advances in cloud computing and much effort is being made by consumers and vendors alike to make the best of what is widely considered to be the next step in e-business. However, like with every good thing, there are challenges to advancing the general knowledge and confusion largely due to misconceptions about cloud computing in Canada in general. 

There is a growing number of organizations that make use of the general lack of knowledge about cloud computing in Canada in an effort to enter the cloud computing market. The term cloudwashing has been bandied about to describe what these organizations do in their efforts to gain a share of mind with Canadian consumers. Some organizations have even taken the moniker "cloud provider" in order to describe the products and services they provide as being cloud computing; they typically offer some sort of product “as a service”. The litmus test here is whether these products and services adhere to the basic characteristics of cloud computing such as those published by the NIST. Making data available to citizens or allowing them to use that data to write an app under an open government initiative is a great idea. But those two things in and of themselves do not constitute cloud computing. Part of the blame lies with the industry at large. That said, we should concede that there are such things as "cloud based services" that have cloud computing-like properties but are not, strictly speaking, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. 

One thing to note, is that much of the content generated by these organizations borrows from cloud computing to justify how their offering really is cloud computing (hence the cloudwashing). This is not a problem, in and of itself, but when competing vendors approach the same customer with different definitions of cloud computing, there can be confusion resulting in a delay in the adoption of cloud computing. This, I submit is one reason (maybe low on the list behind security, GRC, vendor lock-in, and standards concerns) why adoption has lagged in Canada, economic issues notwithstanding.

Everyone is trying to move cloud computing forward in Canada. There is little doubt about its benefits, at this point. However, cloudwashing does not help the cause and results in confusion in the minds of consumers. It is this confusion that is causing the hesitation in the marketplace and hindering educational efforts. There has to be some consensus in the market about what cloud computing is, what a cloud based service is, and what is simply not within the realm.