How would you describe the cloud in 3 words?

We put this question to the good people on Quora to see what people thought were the core principles behind cloud computing and to also see what creative answers people could come up with. We certainly got a range of responses, here are a few of our favourites:

We put this question to the good people on Quora to see what people thought were the core principles behind cloud computing and to also see what creative answers people could come up with. We certainly got a range of responses, here are a few of our favourites:

– Rent, don’t buy.
– CIO becomes strategic
– Virtualized Computing Service
– On-demand scalable services
– Can’t touch this (Slightly retro and very simple)
– Outsource your datacentre
– Big database(s) (in the) sky
– My data everywhere

You can view the full thread and add your own suggestions here

For me, the cloud is scalable, self-service and accessible. Accessibility and sharing were two key drivers when we created Bime, to allow users to get their dashboards and visualizations to the right people, quickly, through a simple URL. In the office we use a range of cloud solutions, Salesforce, Dropbox & our own Bime to name but a few, easy to implement and highly scalable as we grow. There has been a lot of hype surrounding cloud computing this last year (touched upon by a few tongue-in-cheek responses in the thread) but for us, this hype is justified and that is why we gambled on the cloud when we created Bime; built for the cloud, runs in the cloud !

This word cloud summarizes the words used so far (click for larger view):

Word cloud created using Wordle