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Peter Mell coauthored The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing by Peter Mell and Timothy Grance in 2011. The publication identifies on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service as essential characteristics.^[ref]

The classification separates what service a consumer controls from how it is deployed. Infrastructure, platform and software services expose different management boundaries, while public, private, community and hybrid deployments describe organizational arrangements. A service can therefore be publicly accessible without giving its consumers control of the underlying operating systems.

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.