Impact of Cloud Computing: Beyond a Technology Trend

Cloud Computing is being widely promoted as the next enterprise computing paradigm and a solution to most current enterprise IT problems. IT experts are making bold predictions about Cloud Computing and IT vendors are making major investments to implement infrastructure for delivery of Cloud Computing services, while IT users express concerns about various aspects of this new enterprise computing model. In this paper we consider Cloud Computing in a historical context of evolution of enterprise computing and briefly review the benefits and challenges of Cloud Computing. We then discuss the likely impact of wide adoption of Cloud Computing on both the providers and consumers of Cloud Computing services, and argue that Cloud Computing represents a continuation of existing trend towards centralization of IT resources resulting in increased specialization and ultimately leading to most end user organizations abandoning IT ownership.