A Gartner report listing cloud computing at the top of its strategic technology areas
further reaffirmed its prominence as an industry trend by announcing its formal defini-
tion as:
“…a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered
as a service to external customers using Internet technologies.”
This is a slight revision of Gartner’s original definition from 2008, in which “massively
scalable” was used instead of “scalable and elastic.” This change ackno