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September 30, 2010—The essentials about cloud computing are explained in a new white paper from the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

Gartner predicts that by 2012 one in five businesses will not own its own information technology (IT) assets. One reason for this trend is the move by organizations toward the cloud computing approach to distributed computing as a means to reduce IT hardware costs.  

The emergence of this approach and its promise to save money is making it more imperative for organizations to examine whether cloud computing makes sense for them. To maneuver through the fog around cloud computing, these organizations first need to know the basics about the technology.

In Basics About Cloud Computing, Grace Lewis identifies core concepts and explains

• three types of providers
• two ways to access services
• eight drivers for adoption
• seven barriers to adoption
• the approach’s relationship to service-oriented architecture and grid computing

Grace Lewis focuses SEI research into cloud computing on separating reality from hype about this promising approach. Lewis also leads SEI to develop an SOA research agenda, as well as SOA technologies and SOA training courses.

This white paper is available at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/whitepapers/cloudcomputingbasics.cfm.