The Intercloud

The Intercloud^[67] is an interconnected global "cloud of clouds"^[68][69] and an extension of the Internet "network of networks" on which it is based.^[70] The term was first used in the context of cloud computing in 2007 when Kevin Kelly stated that "eventually we'll have the intercloud, the cloud of clouds. This Intercloud will have the dimensions of one machine comprising all servers and attendant cloudbooks on the planet.".^[68] It became popular in 2009^[71] and has also been used to describe the datacenter of the future.^[72]

The Intercloud scenario is based on the key concept that each single cloud does not have infinite physical resources. If a cloud saturates the computational and storage resources of its virtualization infrastructure, it could not be able to satisfy further requests for service allocations sent from its clients. The Intercloud scenario aims to address such situation, and in theory, each cloud can use the computational and storage resources of the virtualization infrastructures of other clouds. Such form of pay-for-use may introduce new business opportunities among cloud providers if they manage to go beyond theoretical framework. Nevertheless, the Intercloud raises many more challenges than solutions concerning cloud federation, security, interoperability, QoS, vendor's lock-ins, trust, legal issues, monitoring and billing.^{[citation needed]}

The concept of a competitive utility computing market which combined many computer utilities together was originally described by Douglas Parkhill in his 1966 book, the "Challenge of the Computer Utility". This concept has been subsequently used many times over the last 40 years and is identical to the Intercloud.