For me, there are a few key points coming out of this year's IT trends issue (or, more accurately, over the last several IT trends issues). The first is that the era of cloud computing is no longer on the horizon; it is more or less the whole sky. And, from what I can see, it will stay that way, so we'd better start taking the design, construction, and management of this new architecture very seriously (a point that Jim communicates clearly in his article, and I could not agree more). One of the fundamental challenges we face is to adopt a wider understanding of the term "cloud." We need to go beyond our early view of the cloud purely as the virtualization of hardware (i.e., the cloud as a storage room) and expand our view as the virtualization of software development and execution environments (i.e., the cloud as a platform) and the virtualization of data and function (i.e., the cloud as a service container).
展开▼
