I've been having a few conversations with various different people over the past few months about the Cloud phenomenon that is currently sweeping the industry, and it's an interesting term and concept. It seems nicely packaged up by a lot of service providers and outsourcing agencies, but it is a lot more than that.

I see the Cloud as stepping up from DR and BURA and move into fully automated Business Continuity. This has nothing to do with external service providers or outsourcing the IT infrastructure, this has to do with how the whole business works. Again, this is more than just keeping the data and systems running. I have a lot of customers that go to a lot of effort to put in a very reliable and proven DR infrastructure, but they have no-where for their employees to work from!

I wanted to post this here as a general open question. What does Cloud Computing and various Cloud terms mean to people out there in the real world? Is anyone seriously looking into it? There's been a lot of press coverage of Cloud systems that have had catastrophic failures, so is it really something to trust and put all your faith into? Is it just a buzz word and a good marketting term in our current economy? Is there anything that NetApp Engineering could possibly give insight into what NetApp could offer as Cloud services at the storage level?

Open to any sort of input or discussion here, so please post your thoughts!