Cloud computing continues to be a topic of discussion

The accidental successful cio

Cloud computing is hot – there’s no denying that. However, as with all things in the information technology field, cloud computing isn’t standing still. Even as  you read these words, engineers are hard at work defining and refining just exactly what a cloud computing architecture looks like and how it behaves. Let’s take a peek at what the future holds…

Where The New Ideas Are Being Born

Although cloud computing research is going on in a number of small start-ups as well as at universities world-wide, the work that is being followed the closest is that which is being done by the very large firms. Here’s a quick run down of what they are doing:

• HP /Intel / Yahoo: These three powerhouses have come together to launch the Cloud Research Testbed. The goal is to allow academic researchers to have access to supercomputing resources in order to try out new ideas such as computing chips that have been designed for cloud computing.

• IBM Research: IBM has taken the global approach and launched itsResearch Compute Cloud. This cloud will be used to support business processes

An interesting article talking about cloud, it’s certainly something that’s getting a lot of the press, it’s the new virtualization if you like (so some of my colleagues have said). Regardless as the economics of business and IT change combined with the possibilities of the technology, the way we provision, charge for and support our IT needs to change with it. This will mean some significant changes in the enterprise for some, but interestingly I wonder if the roles (for the short time anyway) might stay the same, we still need the OS guys, the networks and the application teams, but how it’s consumed, how it’s paid for and who you work for, that’s where we might see more change.

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