Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing

The National Institute of Standards

• Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be and Technology (NIST) defines the elastically provisioned and released, five essential characteristics of cloud in some cases automatically, to computing: scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand.
• On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing
• Measured service. Cloud systems capabilities, such as server time automatically control and optimize and network storage, as needed resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction

automatically without requiring human appropriate to the type of service (e.g., interaction with each service provider. storage, processing, bandwidth, and

• Broad network access. Capabilities

active user accounts).

are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms

The ISO/IEC 17788 standard includes the that promote use by heterogeneous NIST characteristics and adds a sixth: thin or thick client platforms (e.g.,

• Multi-tenancy. A feature where physical

mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and or virtual resources are allocated and workstations).

controlled so that processing and data

• Resource pooling. The provider's

for different end-user organizations computing resources are pooled to (tenants) are isolated from and serve multiple consumers using a inaccessible to one another. multi-tenant model. Different physical and virtual resources are dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth.