Washington, D.C. - infoZine - The Cloud Computing model offers the promise of massive cost savings combined with increased IT agility. It is considered critical that government and industry begin adoption of this technology in response to difficult economic constraints. However, cloud computing technology challenges many traditional approaches to datacenter and enterprise application design and management. Cloud computing is currently being used; however, security, interoperability, and portability are cited as major barriers to broader adoption.

NIST has defined Cloud Computing as follows: "Cloud Computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous,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 cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

The five essential characteristics are:

• on-demand self-service
• broad network access
• resource pooling
• rapid elasticity
• measured service.

The three service models are Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (laaS).

The four deployment models are Private Cloud, Community Cloud, Public Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud.

The increasingly popular cloud model provides as-needed access to computing with the appearance of unlimited resources. Users are given access to a variety of data and software utilities to manage their work. Billing for services is based on usage; users rent virtual resources and pay for only what they use. Underlying these services are data centers that provide "virtual machines" (VMs). Virtual machines make it easy to host computation and applications for large numbers of distributed users by giving each the illusion of a dedicated computer system. It is anticipated that cloud platforms and services will increasingly play a critical role in academic, government and industry sectors, and will have widespread societal impact. Accordingly, NSF is committed to providing the science and engineering communities with the opportunity to conduct research and education activities in cloud and data-intensive computing and their applications.

Related Cloud Computing Report Link
NSF Report on Support for Cloud Computing ( PDF )