Krishnan Subramanian's Library tagged gigaom →  View Popular

Public utility cloud services differ from traditional data center environments — and private enterprise clouds — in three fundamental ways. First, they provide true on-demand services, by multiplexing demand from numerous enterprises into a common pool of dynamically allocated resources. Second, large cloud providers operate at a scale much greater than even the largest private enterprises. Third, while enterprise data centers are naturally driven to reduce cost via consolidation and concentration, clouds — whether content, application or infrastructure — benefit from dispersion.

When in doubt, I defer to the five essential characteristics recently laid out in the NIST Cloud Computing definition: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service.

The real problem is your existing applications, which are designed under conventional internal network assumptions. They are chatty, too tightly bound and too finely grained. They make the naïve assumption of a relatively secure operating environment and depend on localized security and identity contexts. You cannot simply redistribute these to public clouds and then try to force the long-haul communication to change to accommodate their needs. Instead, the applications need to change.

Globally, there will be a mammoth 46 million telecommuters by 2011, according to Gartner.