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Cloud computing is the 21st century IT landscape...

timwessels 20th May 2010

Good food for thought. I'm not sure why you neglected SaaS, which is generally regarded as the third leg of cloud computing along with IaaS and PaaS. SaaS is the aspect of cloud computing that will initially reach the widest audience because it is easy to do it and has numerous advantages. PaaS is more geared to development and testing right now, but is critical to the long term success of cloud computing for the simple reason that when all app development is done in the cloud that is where people will go to run their apps. I agree that IaaS is the most evolutionary aspect of cloud computing and the area where the most work still needs to be done. The whole "standards" framework for IaaS is now just being addressed. Cloud interoperability could be the "holy grail" of cloud computing. Many people will hold off on IaaS until it is transparently simple to move a workload from Amazon to RackSpace and back and still have your data readily available. These are the excitement years for cloud computing, which are not unlike the early years of Local Area Networking in the mid-1980s. I think that within the next 5-10 years cloud computing will be a done deal. IT pros who plan on being around to see how it all turns out need to learn this stuff and get their hands dirty and then figure out how to use it to improve the delivery of IT services to their customers both inside and outside their organizations. Resistance is futile...you will be assimilated...into the cloud. Thanks again for a thought-provoking article.