Describing what I do for work in a casual conversation varies quite a lot these days. My response will depend on the background understanding of the audience. If I am honest, I say I work in “IT” and move on to more interesting conversation. But, I find what I do really interesting and it is about time I put some thought into explaining the jargon in tech so I can use the vernacular with more people. In this series of posts I will explain the terminology commonly used in wide world of technology to a person like my Mum. This kind of person is someone that gets pretty confused by these words and is at odds with computers at time.
The first word I want to have a crack at is the “cloud”. This word I think is the centre piece of tech jargon in the industry. The “Cloud” appears to denote some area of the IT landscape, but might just be well disguised marketing vocabulary. So, what exactly is the cloud?
Cynics that work in the industry describe the cloud has “someone else’s computer”.[1] This statement has some truth but trivialises the term “Cloud” and is not particularly helpful to the uninitiated. In a more optimistic sense, the cloud can be thought of as a third-party hosted platform that provides computing, storage and networking components. These building blocks of IT infrastructure can be arranged to run services for your company or project. And herein lies the problem: in attempting to describe the cloud in a technical sense an excessive amount of technology concepts (computers, networking, data centres, virtualisation, cloud providers etc) are glossed over. As a lay person I think you would stumble at every phrase in the definition on wikipedia.[2] These concepts themselves are abstractions of huge areas of computing. Each of these fundamentals need to be explained in sufficient detail for the non-technical audience to grasp why the cloud can be thought of as “someone else’s computer”. So in my opinion the cloud doesn’t really work as technical language. It attempts to abstract away way too many concepts, is highly subjective and just becomes very cloudy. This has lead me to better interpret the word from a different point of view.
If you look at the word “cloud” from a perspective of someone wanting to understand it as business concept and not a technical concept, the term becomes much easier comprehend:
the cloud provides IT infrastructure to customers for much lower cost than trying to set the infrastructure up themselves.
To clarify: the cloud is a marketing term that describes a business model. The business model is providing IT infrastructure as different service offerings to paying customers so they can host services for their customers, and this allows the business using these services to benefit from the scale of the cloud provider and not having to manage the underlying physical IT infrastructure. A skim through the benefits of the cloud from a cloud provider (Microsoft) seems to add more weight to the business interpretation too.[3]
I must apologise to my Mum here for misrepresenting what I do as a “cloud engineer”. It appears on my LinkedIn and I am sure I have used it once or twice in conversation. The cloud was a word crafted for discussions in boardrooms of executives rather than technical professionals. This also means that word really shouldn’t be aimed at customers of technology products either. In my opinion, I don’t think it is worth salvaging the word “cloud” for any meaningful interpretation in a technical context. Instead I think it is better to focus the other components of the cloud that are obfuscated away by the term. Networking, servers, storage and software are more worthy candidates for explanation as they stand up by themselves in describing the thing they represent, which I will attempt to describe in later posts in this series. Discussing these topics in an approachable way with non-technical people will help aid understanding of what people in the industry do, in the same way we have an appreciation of what doctors, carpenters and accountants do.
As a last aside, as I have worked in the tech industry, I think it is good to have a healthy appreciation for discerning what words are merely marketing buzzwords and which ones deserve your attention as being a part of the way you describe subjects in the field of technology. This is because the quality of your communication matters, as the cost of using marketing fluff words is less accurately describing the things you are truly passionate about.
Thank you for reading.
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