Why is it called the cloud?
It’s not because the servers are stored in a new fancy data center kept at high altitude in order to keep it cool, or that clouds are being harnessed in order to circulate the water again to keep it cool.
As IT systems became more complex and more and more systems were added to networks, it became necessary to create network diagrams to make it easy to understand how everything is connected.
The network teams started it and the server teams soon joined in at which point it became necessary to establish a standard set of icons to represent each object.
You can only properly draw and describe the systems that you are in control of. It would serve no purpose to try to draw all the different systems that connect your firewall to the Internet.
Where you have multiple locations connected to each other via the Internet, we needed a way to simply represent all the different systems in between. To do this a cloud icon was selected.
You can see from the drawing below, how the cloud icon has been used to represent everything that is in between the two buildings but we have no knowledge of those systems as they are managed by the Internet service providers.
When the Internet connections were slow and expensive it was difficult to have systems that were remote, and in most cases all services and systems were kept locally within each site.
Once the Internet got faster it became possible for external service providers to host servers and systems that would normally be held locally on site.
The internal IT teams had no control or visibility of the actual systems that were used to provide these services so, to incorporate them into their drawings they connected them to “the cloud”.
The name stuck and “the cloud” became the standard way for IT teams to reference these remote data centres.
This naming convention has continued and now we all refer to IT services provided from a remotely managed data centre as \”the cloud\”.
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