Synergy 2011: What’s the real cloud? And the personal?

"You can either fight consuermisation or you can embrace it. If you try to fight it you're betting against it I don't think that's a good bet."

Citrix would like to see organisations have the personal cloud line up and work with the public and private clouds.

"We don't think we're in the post-PC era, we think we're in the three-PC era - three PCs in our lives running with the private cloud, public cloud and personal cloud," Templeton added.

To accommodate this idea, Citrix released some fresh Netscaler products as well as the Follow Me Apps and Follow Me Data concepts in Receiver. These will allow IT departments to let workers access and use company data whether inside or outside of the network.

The products are also designed to ensure data remains safe by providing administrators with overviews of what is going on and encrypting the files themselves rather than relying on hardware protection. As a quick digression, this builds into what chief technology officer (CTO) at Citrix Simon Crosby hailed the end of the traditional security model.

Useful terminology?

You're probably a little sick of the number of terms, definitions and acronyms the cloud computing industry has spawned. And these new phrases from Citrix don't put a name on anything new.

Yet they do offer definitions for some interesting ideas for IT. In particular, accommodating the so-called personal cloud and how OpenStack could be the basis for open cloud technologies in the coming years.