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Clouds. Everybody is talking about them and lots of people are using them.

The idea is simple. Everything exists inside the cloud to which you connect, do your stuff and then leave. The purists will claim that your only access to the cloud should be via a browser (and a Firefox browser at that) but I am not convinced.

After all, one of the best cloud based applications out there right now is Microsoft Exchange and has been for many years. Indeed Exchange was around a long time before people even knew what a cloud was. And with Exchange it works best when you use it with a client such as Outlook although of course there are a number of other ways you can access it.

But then you have things like Microsoft Mesh where you can deploy applications into YOUR Mesh or more importantly YOUR CLOUD. Sure you can invite others to your cloud but it’s still your cloud and not the cloud.

Then you have the corporate platform.

In my organisation we have a large enterprise network and on that network sit a whole host of applications and resources. So is this a cloud?

After all it is central (to fellow employees) and I can access those applications from any corporate location (or even from Starbucks if I use a VPN). Most of our key applications are browser based and we have file shares and document management systems. This sounds to me like a cloud all be it a private one.

So maybe what we really have is lots of clouds. Your cloud, my cloud, public clouds and the many corporate clouds.

With this many clouds, does it look like rain ?

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