Future is Cloud Computing

"Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users point of view they need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them."

Business need Cloud Computing:

Todays Businesses want the flexibility to outsource the provisioning of infrastructure to people who can be presumably more efficient at it than they can be. The motivation is going to come really from having other people provide the —power, the day-to-day management, the reliability, uptime and so forth. Businesses want to have the option of moving their application loads into, and equally importantly back out of, this outsourced infrastructure as they see fit.
From the consumer point of view, ultimately the user wants his information to belong to him and not to any particular device. Increasingly, individuals are characterized by a body of digital information. And that information needs to live on over a period of decades—the rest of our lives—beyond the lifetime of any device you might have. So most of us will become customers of an "information bank" and in so doing become dependent on the cloud. You can see this trend already starting with hosted e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.

What are the challenges?

How do you operate at this scale, how do you make things essentially bulletproof in terms of reliability, security and privacy. Those are tough things to do. There are a lot of companies who don't realize there is a discipline and an approach to operating a service that is different from developing a software product. Companies have to learn that as they go forward.

How does cloud computing fit in the context of the history of computing?

We are in a big transition from a device-centric world to an information-centric world. It's going to be about how do you make the information useful and available and make that the center of people lives instead of specific devices. Devices will have to cleave to the information rather than the other way around. IT infrastructure, the plumbing, will fade away for most users and businesses, and will increasing be left to professional providers.

Is there a risk of a lock-in if companies start relying on a cloud provider?

There is going to be the classic tension between the interest of the user who wants things to be standardized, portable and to have choice and the interest of the provider who wants to have a very sticky relationship with the customer.

Who will run these clouds?

There will be a variety of companies who want to make a business of it. And we don't believe it will come down to two or three guys at the end. We think it will be hundreds of outfits who want to provide these services. Like Google, Amazon etc.