Yet Another Cloud

Despite the current crisis, the demand for cloud computing is growing at enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Some customers consider virtual infrastructure in the Internet as cloud, while others deem their business applications delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment style as cloud computing. This enormous bandwidth of customer perception often leads to confusion. Also, many service providers and product vendors are afraid of missing the cloud bus and are starting to call everything a cloud product. This report tried to classify the various cloud and SaaS services and relates them to existing products and services. Vendors can categorize their portfolio along this taxonomy and structure their marketing positioning to be more understandable and importantly more credible. IT users can also use the taxonomy to structure their cloud sourcing approach.