Cloud computing, despite--or maybe because of--its status as this year's technology buzz word, remains an amorphous concept.

A recent web-based survey of 602 information technology officials, by IT certification organization CompTIA, found that nearly two-thirds of technology professionals say cloud computing lacks a singular definition.

That's despite a definition from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which holds that:

"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."

Even as industry leans toward adoption of the NIST definition, "there remains a prevailing fuzziness about cloud computing," says a report accompanying the survey results. When asked to associate a list of attributes to cloud computing, the strongest association polled end users could make with cloud computing (with 50 percent of end users strongly associating it) is that cloud computing is "off site."

Between 44 percent and 41 percent of end users also strongly associated attributes "shared," "scalability," "Software as a Service," and "virtualized resource" with cloud computing. The survey has a margin of error of 5.7 percentage points at 95 percent confidence.

On demand self-service, an attribute that NIST says is an essential characteristic of cloud computing, got a strong association among end user survey respondents only 30 percent of the time. Click here for a table listing all five essential characteristics of cloud computing identified by NIST and their association strength (if polled) among end users in the CompTIA survey.

For more:
- go to the CompTIA press release announcing the survey; CompTIA  members can access the report at the CompTIA website.
- go to the NIST cloud computing webpage, or download v15 of its definition of cloud computing (.doc)
- see a table listing NIST cloud computing essential characteristics and their association strength in the CompTIA survey

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