THE FUTURE OF CLOUD COMPUTING OPPORTUNITIES FOR EUROPEAN CLOUD COMPUTING BEYOND 2010

Cloud systems are not to be misunderstood as just another form of resource provisioning
infrastructure and in fact, as this report shows, multiple opportunities arise from the principles for
cloud infrastructures that will enable further types of applications, reduced development and
provisioning time of different services. Cloud computing has particular characteristics that
distinguish it from classical resource and service provisioning environments:
(1) it is (more-or-less) infinitely scalable; (2) it provides one or more of an infrastructure for
platforms, a platform for applications or applications (via services) themselves; (3) thus clouds can
be used for every purpose from disaster recovery/business continuity through to a fully outsourced
ICT service for an organisation; (4) clouds shift the costs for a business opportunity from CAPEX to
OPEX which allows finer control of expenditure and avoids costly asset acquisition and maintenance
reducing the entry threshold barrier; (5) currently the major cloud providers had already invested in
large scale infrastructure and now offer a cloud service to exploit it; (6) as a consequence the cloud
offerings are heterogeneous and without agreed interfaces; (7) cloud providers essentially provide
datacentres for outsourcing; (8) there are concerns over security if a business places its valuable
knowledge, information and data on an external service; (9) there are concerns over availability and
business continuity – with some recent examples of failures; (10) there are concerns over data
shipping over anticipated broadband speeds. The future of cloud computing