Page 256 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

GL OS SARY

data center. An earlier meaning sometimes applies: a breach
of the cloud, or a customer’s inability to reach his own data.

Cloud envy: The tendency of vendors to rename something in
their product to include the term cloud, without necessarily
reengineering any part of the product. See cloudwashing.

Cloud lock-in: A level of difficulty, often arbitrarily imposed by
a vendor, in moving a workload from one cloud supplier to an-

other. Small differences in virtual machine file formats are
one current form of lock-in.

Cloud portability: The ability to move workloads from one
cloud vendor to another without the need to execute a file for-
mat conversion.

Cloud provider: A supplier of cloud services—hardware servers,
software, storage, or all three—from a data center on the In-
ternet.

Cloud storage: A cloud’s offering of a disk storage service.
Some clouds, such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3),
offer storage as part of their infrastructure; others, such as Nir-

vanix, make storage their primary service.

Cloudwashing: When a vendor adds the word cloud to the name
of a product or service that used to go by another name.

Column-oriented database: A database that stores data in the
columns of a table. The dominant form of relational database
uses rows. The column technique allows large numbers of sim-
ilar items to be aggregated and evaluated quickly. Examples
are Sybase IQ and Vertica.

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