CLOUD COMPUTING: A NEW PHASE IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT

The use of cloud computing is becoming widespread, but systematic study of its managerial implications is lacking. This paper examines cloud computing in the context of other major changes in Information Technology (IT) and explores the revolutionary transformations and challenges it brings to IT management. The paper analyzes the IT pendulum of centralization and decentralization and discusses the managerial implications of the major components of cloud computing: hardware (INTEL, IBM chips to support virtualization); services (Google, Amazon.com); applications (SaaS, Software-as-aService) and virtualization (VMware), or their combination (Citrix).