Pew study: cloud computing popular, privacy worries linger - Ars Technica. A new survey by the Pew Internet and American Life project, released Friday morning at Google's Washington, DC headquarters, finds cloud computing applications taking off among Internet users. But respondents also told pollsters that they have profound concerns about ways their personal data might be used—among them, the kind of ad-targeting practiced by... Google. As Internet users increasingly find themselves using multiple (potentially incompatible) networked devices to get online from a variety of locations, it should come as little surprise that large numbers of them are availing themselves of "cloud" services that offload computing or data storage functions to someone else's server, allowing e-mail, photos, or documents to be accessed anywhere. More than half of Internet users have used Web-based e-mail services, which study author John Horrigan called the "starter drug" of cloud computing, while just over a third have stored personal photos on sites like Flickr or Photobucket.
Stormy weather: 7 gotchas in cloud computing. When the computer industry buys into a buzzword, it's like getting a pop song stuck in your head. It's all you hear. Worse, the same half-dozen questions about the hyped trend are incessantly paraded out, with responses that succeed mainly in revealing how poorly understood the buzzword actually is.
These days, the hottest buzzphrase is "cloud computing," and for John Willis, a systems management consultant and author of an IT management and cloud blog, the most annoying question is this: Will enterprises embrace this style of computing? "It's not a binary question," he asserts. "There will be things for the enterprise that will completely make sense and things that won't. " The better question, he says, is whether you understand the various offerings and architectures that fit under that umbrella term, the scenarios where one or more of those offerings would work, and the benefits and downsides of using them. Cloud storage vendors need to create a different pricing model, he says. Cloud computing.
Cloud computing metaphor: For a user, the network elements representing the provider-rendered services are invisible, as if obscured by a cloud. Cloud computing is a computing term or metaphor that evolved in the late 1990s, based on utility and consumption of computer resources. Cloud computing involves application systems which are executed within the cloud and operated through internet enabled devices. Purely cloud computing does not rely on the use of cloud storage as it will be removed upon users download action. Clouds can be classified as public, private and hybrid.[1][2] Overview[edit] Cloud computing[3] relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network.[2] At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services.
Cloud computing, or in simpler shorthand just "the cloud", also focuses on maximizing the effectiveness of the shared resources. Eucalyptus.