John Burkholder

Someone threw this term across my screen today thinking it would impress me and I would have to explain the way a Community Cloud would differ from the standard Public, Private and Hybrid clouds already recognized by the IT community. Here is my explanation: A Community Cloud is much like a Community or Junior College. You can go to a community college for the cheap and receive an "OK" education and when you finally graduate, you can be accepted to any Public College using you transfer. You could also apply to get into a Private College as a transfer but it is going to cost you MUCH more to attend. A Community Cloud follows this same principal...NOT! There isn't a "Community Cloud". There is a Public Cloud which is freely available to anyone on the internet, a Private Cloud which is basically kept from direct Internet access, and Hybrid which uses a combination of the two to meet the needs of the business. One of the reason the term is trying to be adapted

Well, Wikipedia calls it "Cloud computing is an example of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them. The concept generally incorporates combinations of the following: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Platform as a service (PaaS). Software as a service (SaaS). Other recent (ca. 2007–09) technologies that rely on the Internet to satisfy the computing needs of users. Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers. " You have to love that answer...or lack thereof. I find that wikipedia entries are either written for the Nobel Laureate, or for the pet rock. Nothing really in between. So, here we go for the normal people...JB's descriptio