Welcome to the cloud

Sreedhar Kajeepeta, Senior VP and CTO of Covansys (part of CSC) has written a great introduction to Cloud Computing in Software Magazine . He charts the early days of Cloud Computing with Google and Amazon, and looks to the future where IT executives can "begin to take computing power for granted, just as they do their electric power". Sreedhar gave a great talk at Vordel's conference in September, and he's a great thought leader to follow in this area.

One missing piece in Cloud Computing is the client side. How can businesses connect up to the cloud without fear of loss of network connectivity, or fear of information disclosure? The Cloud vendors concentrate, as you would expect, on their own infrastructure, and shy away from supporting infrastructure on the client side. It's up to clients to figure out how to connect up to Cloud services, which is fine if they have an internal development team which can use the APIs. But what if they don't? And what if they want to cache traffic in case the connection to the Cloud is unreliable? What if they want to ensure that the data being sent up to the Cloud Computing provider does not include private information which should not leave the corporate network? All those questions have yet to be answered [but, hint... Gateway technology is an answer].