Monday, January 3, 2011

The Low Cloud

I was chatting with a CIO mate today about the future of cloud computing and how his company are looking to build their own Cloud Enabled Application Platform (CEAP). I feel that many companies are sensitive to putting their data in the cloud itself and my friend definitely echoed that sentiment. There are some things his enterprise could put in to the cloud for economic reasons, but most things will reside behind their firewall.

Interestingly my friend's main driver for a CEAP was to achieve horizontal scalability. He has some performance issues that lend themselves well to being addressed in a highly parallel manner.

During this conversation I used the term "low cloud" to describe CEAP hosted behind the enterprise firewall. So, you heard the term, "low cloud" here first. :-)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't low cloud be "fog"?

Christopher said...

Wouldn't low cloud be "fog"?

Only if it comes into contact with the ground... ;-)

Trevor Clunne said...

You could develop this in to a meme using real cloud types like these (courtesy of WikiPedia)

2 High-level clouds (base above ca. 20,000 feet)
2.1 Cirrus
2.2 Cirrocumulus
2.3 Cirrostratus
3 Medium-level clouds (base ca. 6,500 to ca. 20,000 feet)
3.1 Altocumulus
3.2 Altostratus
4 Low-level clouds (base near surface to ca. 6,500 feet)
4.1 Stratocumulus
4.2 Stratus
5 Low to Medium-level clouds (base near surface to ca. 10,000 feet)
5.1 Nimbostratus
5.2 Cumulus
6 Vertically developed clouds (base near surface to ca. 10,000 feet; tops ca. 40,000 feet or higher)
6.1 Cumulonimbus

Assuming enough people take high level stuff to be more visible than low level stuff CIOs could place orders with vendors along the lines of: "I'd like a Cirrus for our external web site, an AltoStratus for our corporate systems, a Stratus for our our confidential systems and a CumuloNimbus for our planning systems please."