Cloud computing has entered the mainstream vocabulary in Information Technology. Every day the decibel level keeps going up.  Yesterday’s SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com have become the cheer-leaders of the Cloud mantra. Then the arguably godfather role of cloud goes to Jeff Bezos of Amazon. His huge investment in Amazon data center with 30% utilization prompted him to seek new avenues of monetization. Thus came AWS (Amazon Web Services) and its component pieces such as S3, EC2, etc. In the new cloud lexicon, this can be termed as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service).

The cloud model makes sense from an economic and convenience point of view. But fears remain, specially in areas like security, data and control.  Dan Woods of Evolved Technologies wrote this piece on such fears. He explains how such fears of losing control or data security are not meaningful, since the providers of cloud infrastructure have a bigger stake in not guaranteeing such functions. Their survival depends on securing customer’s data and users, and providing uninterrupted service.

I like his conclusion:

But the biggest fear IT people should have about the cloud is failing to understand its true business value. The cloud right now is a technology phenomenon, but to make the biggest impact, its power must be reflected in business terms. Migration of server assets to the cloud or taking advantage of elastic capacity may save a few dollars, but the big money will come when business models of entire industries are reshaped because of the flexibility the cloud offers. The IT person who figures that out will not have to worry about losing his job or losing data. He will be the CEO before too long.

Cloud is here to stay. Larry Dignan of ZDnet wrote this piece about Microsoft’s views on Cloud computing. Microsoft at its financial analyst meeting made the case for being a cloud computing leader and argued that its economic prospects will improve as information technology shifts to an on-demand model.

There you go folks. Even Microsoft, the doyen of “private computing” now sings the cloud song!