Has the NIST “as-a-service” definition come to a crossroads?

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recently published two new documents on cloud computing: the first edition of a cloud computing standards roadmap and a cloud computing reference architecture and taxonomy. Colt has been a strong supporter of the NIST definition of cloud since it came out in 2009 and it has been helpful in defining the scope of cloud computing especially in a business-to-business context. These new documents are equally valuable. However, as we move from theory to practice, tensions are beginning to appear in cloud definitions – and the biggest creaks can be heard in the Service Deployment models of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (infrastructure, Platform and Software-as-a-Service).