Acronym Anarchy: Cloud Acronyms - How Many Do You Know?

By Bradley Jones

Acronyms are rampant in the tech space. Over a decade ago, I presented a challenge to have people look at a list of acronyms to determine how many they could name. I presented a list of over 100 acronyms related to development. I followed this up with a second list of acronyms related to Java terms.

The Cloud has been front and center in the press for several years now. Whether you are using AWS or doing VCC, you are likely to come across numerous acronyms. Today’s challenge focuses on a list of acronyms related to Cloud computing.

I recently read an article that claimed to have a comprehensive list of Cloud Acronyms. The list included six acronyms: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, HPC, MDM, and DaaS. After seeing it, I created the list of Cloud computing acronyms, which is below. To determine what I might have missed, I did a few searches. In those searches, I found an ultimate list with 30 terms that was able to outdo the comprehensive list I had seen earlier. This “ultimate list” did contain a couple of acronyms that I didn’t have, HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and SQL (Structured Query Language). Because they were ultimately further from the core of Cloud computing than some already included, I left them off my list.

Without further ado, below are over 80 acronyms. How many of the following can you identify?

Email Article Print Article AES	HTTPS	S3
AWS	IA	SaaS
BI	IA/CND	SDMN
BYOC	IaaS	SDN
BYOD	IV	SD-LAN
CAMP	IP	SD
CBC	IPaaS	SLA
CD	IoT	SMTP
CDMI	IPSec	SNS
CDN	JSON	SOAP
CDPI	JWT	SQS
CENC	KVM	SPA
CI	L2TP	SRP
COA	LAMP	SSD
COOP	LDAP	SSH
CQRS	LXC	SSL
DaaS	M2M	SWF
DBaaS	MDM	SWT
DNS	ML	TCP
DTLS	MPLS	TLS
EC2	NBI	UDP
EFS	OSS	VDI
EME	PaaS	VM
FTP	PII	VMHD
HaaS	RAID	VOD
HPC	REST	VPC
HTTP	RDS	VPD

Click to the next page to see each acronym expanded. Review the list and see how many you can identify. Can you get them all? As a hint, some of these acronyms lean toward network computing and the Web. After all, such areas are part of Cloud computing!

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