A few things came together for me this week around the Cloud term.  I spent time with one of my best customers discussing online accounting, what we should do to improve the product we represent in the UK, and how we should position to beat the incumbent in the small business market, Sage.  But the first thing that Philip Woodgate told us was how useful the Cloud term is for the clients and business people he deals with.  These are business from small, to medium to International where he struggled explaining SaaS 3 or 4 years ago when he started promoting the concept.  He thinks the Cloud term makes it much easier to "get" for the average business.  

The next thing was this post on ReadWriteCloud with Wordpress.com founder Mat Mullenweg suggesting the Cloud is marketing speak.   Mat was explaining how a recent outage in their service occurred.  Alex William's wrote in the article:

"The cloud gets blamed for almost any online outage these days. It used to be that we'd just say the service went down and there was a failure at the host or the data center.   Sure enough, the Wordpress.com outage is not a cloud disaster. Instead, .. ...

The newly formed EuroCloud UK group held their first member meeting a week ago  at the Thistle City Barbican Hotel - a panel led group discussion on Cloud standards and security.  Chaired by Phil Wainewright, the panel experts were Dr. Guy Bunker, independent consultant and blogger, formerly Symantec's chief scientist and co-author of ENISA's cloud security assessment document, Ian Moyse, Channel Director of SaaS provider Webroot, and Adrian Wright, MD, Secoda Risk Management, formerly global head of information security at Reuters.  

In the spirit of cooperation we had invited Lloyd Adams from Intellect and Jairo Rojas from BASDA because we want to ensure that the three UK Cloud and SaaS vendor groups keep in close contact and try to coordinate their various deliverables and activities as much as is practical.  In addition we invited Richard Anning who heads the ICAEW's IT Faculty.  As I've reported before, Phil, Jairo, Richard and I have been in discussions, triggered by Dennis Howlett, about trying to achieve some form of pragmatic standard or quality mark on security and best practice.  We decided to use this discussion to identify if there ...

One of my recent "quotes of the week" was Lord Puttnam's excellent:

“Technology can only serve as a bridge, never as a destination.”

In recent weeks there has been plenty of activity around the Cloud Computing bridge  with way too much emphasis on jargon and technicalities.  The Intellect SaaS Group has started and is just about to publish a white paper to address that issue.  BASDA has formed a Cloud SIG.  Last week's Cloud p...