We note that our definition does not explicitly require that the services be provided by a third-party, but emphasizes more on the aspects of (1) resource utilization, (2) virtualized physical resources,
(3) architecture abstraction, (4) dynamic scalability of resources,
(5) elastic and automated self-provisioning of resources, (6) ubiquity (i.e. device and location independence) and (7) the operational expense model.