Is cloud computing finally beginning to mature?

The buzz term that came into popularity in the beginning of 2006 to describe an innovative IT deployment architecture, originated from the metaphor that was used to represent the Internet in various network diagrams as early as the 1990s. In a short period of time after the term appeared, solutions were being rapidly marketed by many IT companies and various new buzz words came into vogue such as cloud in a can, cloud bursting, and we suddenly had “blue clouds”, “green clouds”, “white label services” and many others. We witnessed what is now being labeled as cloud washing, the attempts of many vendors to strap the term onto their traditional products, which became the source of huge disambiguation, conflicts and misunderstandings. Today, the term “cloud computing” is everywhere. A quick search on Google for the term “cloud computing” will return 267 million search results. Cloud computing is being marketed as the complex-free efficient method of accessing huge amounts of computing and storage as a service. Behind the curtains though, computing has often been called a huge leap of faith and concerns were fuelled when reports started to surface of random failures (e.g. power outages) and shortcomings of infrastructures. Small black clouds of uncertainty have appeared in the otherwise clear skies of computing