Cloud Computing and Its Implications for Construction IT

Computing (CC) has been attracting a huge amount of interest in the post-dotcom boom and bust and the current web 2.0 information technology world. More recently, the momentum gained by the technology has been so significant that GSA (General Services Administration) in the USA has announced a Federal Cloud Computing Initiative (FedComp, 2009). Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. The term cloud computing was coined by the cloud symbol often used to represent the Internet in schematic diagrams. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, 2009) in the USA has provided a draft Working Definition of Cloud Computing - "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction".This paper investigates the relevance and impact of CC for Construction IT and proposes a framework for implementing a cloud based system for design and construction.