Cloud Computing was probably the most popular buzzword of 2009. There was a lot of hype, but basically, cloud computing is about using the large datacenters of the Internet to your advantage. Either by copying the methods they use to be very scalable and available and applying them in your own datacenter (what VMware is partly trying to do with their "private Cloud", "vCloud"), by outsourcing your infrastructure (PaaS, SaaS) to an external datacenter via the Internet or most likely some hybrid form. 
 
In 2010, all the hype and buzz should materialize. Will you use a form of cloud computing?
 
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  • john810 - Thursday, March 4, 2010 - link

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  • Olen Ahkcre - Monday, January 11, 2010 - link

    Cloud Computing is OK, long as you do NOT care...

    what information is being spent outside the company.
    about the accuracy of the results.
    where the results are coming from.
    what the results will be used for (by third party doing the computing for you).
    about fault tolerance or it's managed in someway in house.

    Cloud Computing... basically it's a free ride.

    What Cloud Computing might be good for... double checking in house results (general computation).

    Cloud Computing just isn't a very good idea overall for anything...
  • Exelius - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link

    Pretty much everything you said here is wrong.

    Cloud computing allows small to mid-size companies to benefit from the hardcore redundancy of enterprise datacenters without having to purchase their own infrastructure.

    It also allows companies building products based on value-add to severely undercut the competition. Say you're an IT support company, and you sell servers to people to get your IT support contracts in place. Now let's say a competitor comes in and underprices your server bid by 50% because he's reselling a cloud system. For a lot of customers, not hosting equipment at their offices is a good thing because they don't have the power, cooling or network redundancy to do it well in the first place.

    I can appreciate security concerns, but most of the large cloud vendors will basically give you full control and visibility from the time the packet enters your virtual network. Why be in the business of owning hardware if you don't have to?
  • leexgx - Sunday, December 27, 2009 - link

    i am guessing the last option is for users who want to see the post count ?? (i picked the last one to see the results, guessing 600 others did as well)
  • Spacecomber - Thursday, December 24, 2009 - link

    January issue of Technolgy Review includes an article called "Security in the Ether", which I thought might be of interest.

    http://www.technologyreview.com/web/24166/">http://www.technologyreview.com/web/24166/
  • ElderTech - Friday, December 25, 2009 - link

    Thanks for the link. Excellent article that mentions the work CMU is doing in encryption research, of which I'm aware. I agree that this is the solution to the usefulness of cloud computing, but there is an anormous effort ahead that's necessary to provide the efficiency required to make it viable. I believe it's possible, but within what time frame is the real question. As the article stated, it took decades of work until Gentry came up with a method of manipulating encrypted data, even though it's not currently practical. But the steady march of technological innovation will eventually overcome this obstacle too. In the meantime, I'll avoid cloud computing for critical uses and sensitive data storage like the plague!
  • ElderTech - Thursday, December 24, 2009 - link

    Dealing with highly confidential financial information, the security risks including loss of data with Cloud Computing are simply too great to incur. Client confidentiality and fudiciary responsibility are the fundamental concerns in today's highly scrutinized financial world, and should have been all along.
  • Jovec - Saturday, December 26, 2009 - link

    Really? And companies are currently keeping my financial data safe?
  • DILLIGAFF - Thursday, December 24, 2009 - link

    i think the model is already validated, and from here on out we are really just measuring success of the various approaches to determine who's "doin it right".

    cloud computing is really 2 fundamental things, and a bunch of challenges associated:

    1) predictable cost of ownership for owner [real-physical life problem of $, cause it makes the world go round]

    2) transparency of access for owner [usually being a technology-meta problem] (transparency for owner of data/tool/ etc. i am not talking about service provider)


    couple folks alluded to some good challenges involved: scalability from individual to mega sized groups, and of course the question of: what to cloud? just data level or go all the way up the app stack.

    the question of "whats right for me", when it comes to the cloud is a newer version of the "rent versus own" question. you can actually figure out quiet a bit about the space by following that model

    the hype has already materialized and we do have enough technology to make it work; and there are "rents available cheaper than mortgages" in the technology sense(itunes, CRM, SFSF, VMware, etc). i do think we will see a greater variety in options if someone is considering the rent option.
  • Wwhat - Thursday, December 24, 2009 - link

    Cloud computing was found to be not wanted by the general public in the early 70's already.
    The only practical uses are already in use, google earth and search engines and fileservers and weather sites, but nobody want to have a dumb terminal like it's the dawn of computing again.
    I don't even get why balmer wants it, MS's OS need more power with every new version, so if people go cloud and by that become less OS bound they'd finally all move to linux and MS would be losing.

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