Cloud Computing and Economics

What is Cloud Computing? We need to see "inside the cloud".

First things first... definitions:

Cloud Computing: "Cloud computing holds the promise of allowing enterprises to save money and resources by offloading some or all of their IT Infrastructure to vendors that provide applications or software infrastructures that are delivered through the Internet."

Wiki: "Cloud computing means Internet ('Cloud') based development and use of computer technology ('Computing'). It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them..."

In other words: Creating economies of scale for the data storage and computing demands of customers. This is massive my dear reader.

Cloud computing holds an economic opportunity for IT companies and will create a whole new internet economy in a few years.

The most common examples of cloud computing are Google Apps and Amazon storage services, but a lot of companies are starting to position themselves in that arena: IBM, Microsoft, VMWare, HP, etc. These are the industry major players who of course are putting some of their huge amount of eggs into this new business.

The whole idea of cloud computing is utility computing and this is... inevitable: Computing and Storage will become commodities that are easily accessible for individuals and enterprises of all size. This means 3 things:

1. These big players will take a huge piece of this cake and will host most of tomorrows data and computing power;

2. A new opportunity for companies that develop software to partner with the giants so that their applications can become available to the market;

3. A new trend in how we see distributed computing (desktops and distributed storage and processing).

All of that said I believe that this will only boost when internet access becomes truly ubiquitous, i.e, when we can all access the web from any device at any time and... at an affordable price.

I see opportunities....