This week we have chosen the term “cloud computing” since on Monday 28th of January Europe marked it as the annual data protection day against threats like cloud computing. Read more
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I think cloud computing is an interesting example of indeterminacy in terminology. Cloud and cloud computing are technical terms that have recently become very common buzzwords also in everyday language, and yet they remain fuzzy concepts for many – a recent American survey found that 29% of those taking part thought “the cloud” was either an actual cloud, the sky or something related to the weather, 51% said stormy weather would interfere with cloud computing and only 16% correctly identified cloud computing as a computer network to store, access, process and share data from Internet connected devices.
Timothy Chou, one of the fathers of cloud computing, explains that it was a vague concept from the start: «In fact, the word “cloud” comes from the fact that many years ago those of us who built and sold client server applications, software and hardware used to draw a picture with the PC connected to a network and the network connected to a server. Since none of us actually understood how the network worked, we drew a cloud and labeled it “network” and left it at that.»
This indeterminacy might explain why cloud computing and cloud identify different concepts as IT terms (respectively, the use of computing resources and a mataphor for the virtual area that contains such resources) but are often considered synonyms in everyday, non-specialized usage, not only in English but also in other languages. The Italian terms in IATE, cloud computing and nuvola informatica (“IT cloud”) are a proof that this ambiguity exists also in Italian (see also Cloud e lessico comune).