What is cloud computing? We recently asked a number of people in our industry, and got back a range of interesting, and sometimes self-referential, responses. According to our respondents, cloud computing means anything from a single-tenant, multi-user application cloud (also known as software-as-a-service or “Saas”) to multi-tenant, general purpose, on-demand clouds (sometimes called platform-as-a-service or “PaaS”).

I think the world of computing, generally, is moving away from a do-it-yourself approach to accomplish “shared” computing (and by computing is meant anything having to do with servers, in general) towards embracing or, better, stepping into the cloud for most computing the isn’t on the edge of the network.

The migration has begun from dedicated, collocated servers to the cloud. Buyers don’t want to take possession of servers, routers, switches, network drops, racks; they want this from the cloud.

But what is the cloud?

What sort of cloud computer(s) should …