How Many Cloud Types Do We Have?

During his opening keynote at the Parallels Summit 2009, Serguey Belousov, CEO of the virtualization producer defined a few types of clouds*.

• Cloud Type 1: The Google cloud. Truly massive, huge data centers, heavily hardware dependent, unmatched in many senses.
• Cloud Type 2: The Microsoft cloud. Also massive, less hardware dependent, more user-fueled at its heart.
• Cloud Type 3: Other super-size large clouds, among the largest being IBM and Apple, but also including EMC, HP, Amazon, Facebook, Adobe etc.
• Cloud Type 4: Channel clouds of service providers, telcos, ISPs, SaaS ISV, web hosters etc
• Cloud Type 5: In-house clouds of large companies, serving subsidiaries, departments, affiliates and sometimes employees and partners.

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* Cloud (Cloud computing) is a networking model of development and use of the computer technologies. It is used for creation and development of dynamic, scalable and virtualized IT products, that vendors provide as service over the Internet.