Cloud characteristics
An IT environment requires a specific set of characteristics to enable the remote provisioning of scalable and measured IT resources in an effective manner. These characteristics need to exist to a meaningful extent for the IT environment to be considered an effective Cloud.
The following six specific characteristics are common to the majority of Cloud environments:
- On-demand usage
- Ubiquitous access
- Multitenancy (and resource pooling)
- Elasticity
- Measured usage
- Resiliency
On-demand usage
A Cloud consumer can unilaterally access Cloud-based IT resources, giving the Cloud consumer the freedom to self-provision these IT resources. Once configured, usage of the self-provisioned IT resources can be automated, reducing human involvement with the Cloud consumer or Cloud provider. This results in an on-demand usage environment. Also known as on-demand self-service usage, this characteristic enables the service-based and usage-driven features found in mainstream Clouds.
