I had quite a week at the HTG event and ConnectWise Partner Summit. Besides the great speakers and engaging meeting, Channel Insider's Larry Walsh and I had a great discussion about Cloud and Managed Services.

The discussion led to a blog post, which I'll quote a little here...

We both were down at the HTG meetings, and he was presenting the Project Nimbus results to a packed room of my HTG colleagues. Larry and Channel Insider Editor Carolyn April were presenting the initial findings of the group, and we were discussing the definitions of cloud computing.

The definition the group came up with is this:

"Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models”

The focus on cloud computing definitions always brings up managed services, because cloud computing can be a managed service. As the paper defines, “Cloud computing can be a managed service (network administration, security appliance monitoring and management, remote storage management), but not all managed services are cloud computing.” The discussion revolved around the idea of a Venn diagram, where the circular overlap resulted in those cloud computing solutions that were also managed services."

Check out the full article here.