Timothy Grance coauthored the 2011 NIST definition of cloud computing with Peter Mell. It specifies five essential characteristics, service models and deployment models rather than equating every remotely accessed computer with a cloud.[ref]
For example, rapid elasticity concerns provisioning and releasing capacity as demand changes; it is distinct from resource pooling, which concerns sharing provider resources among consumers. A manually provisioned remote server can lack the on-demand and elasticity characteristics. Separating these properties makes system descriptions more informative than simply attaching a cloud label.
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