The Implications of the Cloud in 2012 and Beyond

by Vince Kellen

Vince Kellen takes on the entirely obvious trend of cloud computing and discusses the different ways it is likely to impact organizations in 2012 and beyond. Once again, if we think about what has been happening to computing's three components, it becomes clearer that cloud computing is a logical consequence. Why? Commodity-class, large-scale clusters are already commonplace, Web services have been maturing over the past decade to allow for better integration, and server virtualization has matured, with three or four dominant ad hoc standards emerging (hypervisors from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and KVM). Large-scale and reasonably well-integrated infrastructure has now been made available as a commodity product on demand. As regional networks achieve 40 gigabit (and beyond) speeds, cloud providers and cloud consumers can build virtual data centers spanning multiple data centers across the globe.