IBM: Cloud computing is a new way of consuming IT

Following a day long conference IBM took a chance to talk about Cloud Computing. Since late 2007 IBM has been working with 35 universities helping to extend their services to students and researchers. Now it seems that IBM are planning how to start offering this service to businesses.

IBM have started by building 9 IBM Cloud Labs for business, and are looking to expand that figure to around 20. These Cloud Labs are mostly being used by software developers at the moment as extensive testing is needed.

Cloud computing allows business that do not have great deal of IT skills to easily have access to complicated system software configurations, this is seen as an opportunity to expand governments and banks in countries such as Africa and Vietnam. With cloud computing you can have offices miles apart without a VPN connection that can access the same information, with the same applications without having to be configured in a local network, so in effect all the hard work is carried out by the cloud

As you can probably see the potential of Cloud Computing is high, but at the moment is held back by the speed and reliability of Internet connections, that said some extremely complicated day to day tasks a server has to carry out will not cause a lot of traffic and the money that Cloud Computing saves companies especially in uncertain early days can be huge. For a more detailed look into what IBM had to say check out InformationWeek.