Economics of Cloud Computing

Return on Investment is key for large and small organizations in these risky times. A key mitigator of ROI risk is the avoidance of capital expenditure on IT infrastructure. While traditional Application Service Provider style hosting services do fit this bill, there is a new service on the horizon that has key benefits over the ASP model - cloud computing. Cloud computing leverages virtualized resources to isolate the developer and user from details of the infrastructure, while spreading infrastructure capital expenses over a large number of hosted applications. Bill will discuss the realities of hosted applications, including the current popular ASP models, and compare them to cloud computing. There will be an overview of cloud computing architecture and strategy. He will end with a comparison of various commercial cloud services, including Google AppEngine, Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure.