What is Cloud?

The slide at left was one of my favorites from Craig Balding's Cloud Security Ghost Story talk from Black Hat EU earlier this year.

I like that he shows that a "cloud" does not mean a "VM farm" run by admins who require users to endure lengthy provisioning processes, followed by requests from the IT department for the supposed "customer" to provide information and resources they would expect to get from the Cloud.

Real Clouds are provisioned via credit card, are trivial and transparent to extend, and make life easier for the customer, not a hassle!