As more companies begin to dip their toe into the water that is the use of cloud - or those who were early adopters begin to ramp up the scale and breadth of their use of cloud services - one thing is becoming apparent. If a cloud service is one based, according to common definition on “internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided on demand”, then ultimately that disaggregation of supply from the method of delivery should mean that infinite resources are available to a user.

The reality, of course, is that when organisations adopt cloud computing, they typically do so by subscribing to a service from a cloud provider. In doing so, they are anchoring the services they consume to the capability of that provider – their systems, assets, locations, and delivery methods. Which of course provides its own boundaries and limitations.

Taking that to one side for a moment, another current trend and increasingly common term is that of crowd sourcing – the concept of taking a requirement and outsourcing it to a community who can all contribute to the delivery of that task. This is being used for a variety of activities, including things like software development – and is arguably the foundation of the approach to the ongoing iteration of open-source software code.

So, what if we could combine these two concepts? Imagine being able to crowd source cloud services....to effectively take our computing requirements and rather than tether them to a single provider, distribute them across a broad community of cloud service providers. This would not only spread the load, and decrease any limitations in the supplier, but would also create a dynamic, competitive market where more of the volume could migrate to the supplier with the lowest price and best value service.

Such approaches are increasingly possible. By relying on automated systems to provide cloud governance which can aggregate supply of services, validate pricing, dynamically provision environments across multiple providers, distribute workloads appropriately, and monitor the quality of the services being provided. Indeed, if we are going to truly exploit cloud services, surely the only way to truly complete disaggregation of requirements from the assets delivering against those requirements, is to do exactly that – to crowd source the cloud.