For a technology that has existed for some 15 years, the form and meaning (or semantics) of cloud computing remains oddly unsettled. Depending on who you talk to, cloud may or may not incorporate as-a-service (aaS) solutions for infrastructure (IaaS), platforms (PaaS) or software (SaaS).
Clouds may be public (off-premises) or private (on-premises), or both (hybrid), and might or might not incorporate various public cloud services (multi-cloud). Most cloud service providers (SPs) act as hosts for often massive troves of customer data, but some argue that hosting services are not, per se, cloud.
