Today’s Forecast: Cloudy

This is a well thought out and cogent article. The differences between cloud and grid computing represent another interesting angle.

There???s been a lot of hype lately about cloud computing and with it, a lot of debate over what it is and what it???s not. Certainly, automated provisioning of virtualized computing resources constitutes an important step toward the promise of utility computing. However, while current cloud technologies support web applications adequately, they do nothing for the types of extreme-scale computing that require hundreds or even thousands of processors. As Parabon Computation continues to prove in the market, grid computing services, which can even share resources with cloud services, are now delivering this kind of computation on demand to large enterprises and start-ups alike. Whether deployed alongside cloud solutions within the data center or across an enterprise, the grid approach delivers extreme-scale computation as a utility, enabling new discoveries and the solutions to real world problems in record time.

Thank you,
Dr. Steven Armentrout
President and CEO, Parabon Computation

Call me a naysayer, but this is a load of bull this time around as well.
The name is new and by invoking the omnipresent natural phenomenon of clouds, wants to give the impression of an all-powerful, always working and forever present computing environment that keeps your data and provides all functionality desired by you on demand.

The reality though is a lot less reassuring:
- Wherever there is data, the specter of theft looms large. No existing system is entirely fool-proof or logically 100% secure.
- Your connection to your data is another thing that is not 100% guaranteed all the time. If your broadband or 3G suffered downtime, then good luck trying to access your pictures or phonebook.
- How about the revenue model? Web email works because people grudgingly came to accept scanning of their email texts to show them relevant ads. This concept may not find many takers when it applies to all of people's data.

More fool-proof, idiot-proof and with better redundancy, systems are required before cloud computing may fly.

You missed an important point.

You said that no one has put the pieces together successfully. That's wrong. "Cloud" computing used to be called the "ASP" (Application Service Provider) model. One company started back then and has proven the concept with much courage and now, with much success.

That is SalesForce.com which has more than a million users and a great working "Cloud" model.

The technology is already here and it works great.