WP Cloud WIBU WhitePaper Licensing in the cloud EN | Page 3

W hit e Pape r
What‘s in a Name?
When you hear the term “Cloud Licensing”, what do you think of? This simple term sounds rather innocuous
at first glance, but as is ever the case, the devil is in the details. Let’s look at this a little closer. First, let’s
examine the concept of the cloud, because we all know what it means, right?
A quick web search of the meaning of the term cloud computing provides the following definition: the
practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data,
rather than a local server or a personal computer. But where does this fit into the definition, and what
is the distinction between Internet and intranet? It could be argued that an intranet is hosted within a
building and the Internet connects that network with servers not physically residing in said building. But
what about VPN usage, for example? If you are at home using a VPN to access company servers, are you
accessing them via the Internet or the intranet – or both? Is there a difference between a private cloud and
an on-premise cloud? What is a hybrid cloud?
If you were allowed to locally install an obvious cloud service – Twitter, for example – would it immediately
cease to become a cloud service? Would it, in effect, change its very nature, just because the electrons
accessing it didn’t have to leave the building? Is it only a cloud if you don’t physically own or control the
service-running hardware? Or is that a client/server architecture? Peer-to-peer technologies muddy the
waters even further.
It has often been said that there is nothing new under the sun, and this is true of the cloud computing
paradigm. You hear it everywhere: Software in the cloud, your platform in the cloud, data in the cloud. It
seems these days that pretty much everything IT related will be in the cloud. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me
if at some stage in the near future, people will just access all their services and data through the use of a
mouse, keyboard, and monitor with a very low powered computer acting as a lean client. Just imagine that.
Some say that the phrase cloud computing can be traced back to 2006, when companies such as Google
and Amazon started to use this term to describe the ability of people to access software, files, and even
computing power over the web. But around ten years before this, a group of technologists at Compaq
were discussing software and file access in the web by something they called cloud computing-enabled
applications. However, based on the above definition, one example of cloud computing could be seen in
the automatic teller machine (ATM), the very first of which is widely considered to have been installed
by Barclays Bank in London in 1967. Indeed, Computer Weekly wrote that cloud computing is believed to
have been invented by Joseph Licklider in the 1960s with his work on ARPANET to connect people and
data from anywhere at any time. In 1989, I spent some time in Stuttgart, Germany, working on a CRAY
supercomputer that was itself located in Munich.
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