So what is Cloud Computing? Everyone seems to be getting their businesses into or onto "the cloud" but as far as most of us can see the cloud appears to be all things to all people.

The problem is it all started out so simply with the cloud just as a metaphor for something that the user does not need to understand (or see, hence it is obscured by a cloud). However people soon found lots of stuff to hide behind the cloud and the metaphor became horribly stretched.

Nowadays people understand anything cloud related to be about a technology delivered as a service rather than a product. it has spawned a new generation of four letter acronyms, most famous of which is Software as a Service (SaaS) The concept is pretty simple, the customer wants to have a service that meets a need, the service provider gives the customer that and commits to some guarantees in the form of an SLA to support the service. This is known as delivering 'as a Service' (aaS)

At Carrenza we deliver the Services under the hood. Infrastructure (IaaS) and Platform (PaaS). Infrastructure delivers the functionality which used to be delivered by facilities such as data centres or server rooms and by hardware like servers and firewalls. Platform delivers the management and operations used to keep the infrastructure running and to support the delivery of the Software which sits on top. This means things like backup, anti-virus, operating system support and application support.

Gartner thinks the cloud is the way of the future, freeing businesses from having to operate and support ICT systems and allowing them to focus on their core tasks. We agree, which is why we are innovating to make cloud computing something for every business, not just for dotcoms and e-commerce, but for the enterprise systems which drive every business. We like to think of our task simply as "Enabling the Enterprise Cloud"