Taking the High Ground

Cloud computing offers tremendous opportunities for private industry, governments, and even individuals to access massive amounts of computational resources on-demand at very low cost. Recent advancements in bandwidth availability, virtualization technologies, distributed programming paradigms, security services and general public awareness havecontributed to this new business model for employing information technology (IT) resources. IT managers face tough decisions as they attempt to balance the pros and cons of integrating commercial cloud computing into their existing IT architectures. On one hand, cloud computing provides on-demand scalability, reduces capital and operational expenses, decreases barriers to entry, and enables organizations to refocus on core competencies rather than on IT expertise.