Midmarket CIO Research Library

The topic of cloud computing has received tremendous attention in the past year. Cloud computing, in a nutshell, is the delivery of some aspect of IT (infrastructure, platforms, or applications) as a service that is accessed via Internet standards and infrastructure. Several factors have driven attention to this emerging computing model. From a technology point of view, the maturation of virtualization software has enabled highly efficient and dense computing, key to the success of a cloud. Consumers have driven much of the initial wave of cloud server deployments, as social media and other Web 2.0 usage has skyrocketed. The next wave of cloud is expected to come from the enterprise, as the pressures of the current economy drive many companies to consider new IT models when they are forced to continue to do more with less.