Recently Forrester stated that 70% of "private clouds" aren't really clouds at all http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/022613-forrester-private-clouds-267108.html Therein lies a tale of deceit, misinformation and false gratification of many organizations believing they have a cloud in place. To get the facts right we need to revisit the definition of cloud computing as defined by NIST which in may opinion is the final authority on cloud computing standards and is followed by the industry and professionals. http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, 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 is composed of five essential characteristics, t