Abstract
Today's IT infrastructure is under tremendous pressure and is finding it difficult to keep up. In distributed computing environments, up to 85 percent of computing capacity sits idle. 66 percent of every dollar on IT is spent on maintaining current IT infrastructures versus adding new capabilities. In history, operations have industrialized to become smarter. Cloud Computing is positioned to industrialize the IT delivery of the future. It is a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of multiple technical advances in the distributed computing area including virtualization, grid computing, autonomic computing, utility computing and software-as-a-service. It provides a new paradigm for consumption and delivery of IT based services - It provides an enhanced user experience with a self-service user interface for IT management. It abstracts the technical details from end-users so that they no longer need expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. It provides flexible pricing based on pay per usage. It enables flexible delivery and sourcing models including private, public and hybrid clouds. Finally, it provides automated provisioning and elastic scaling of IT infrastructure. This paper presents several views on different perspectives of Cloud Computing, including technical advancement, IT delivery and deployment modes, and economics.