This resource is no longer available
In a remarkably short time, cloud computing has emerged as a hugely important evolution in the way that businesses and individuals consume and operate computing. It’s a fundamental shift to an operational model in which applications don’t live out their lives on a specific piece of hardware and in which resources are more flexibly deployed than was the historical norm.
This paper lays out the characteristics of a cloud computing infrastructure. It discusses some of the things that cloud computing isn’t, even if they’re often conflated in customers’ and prospects’ minds. It also describes the forms that cloud computing can take and how different types of technology providers and consumers of technology relate to each other.