We’re heading into the clouds

If you were hit by a car last year and woke up in 1973 wearing a flower print nylon shirt, skin tight leather jacket and Cuban heels, then you may have missed the technology world becoming obsessed with clouds. Now before you think your return to 2010 has been corrupted and the IT world has gone insane and now lies on its back in fields and pastures looking for cat shaped fluffy white weather clouds, do not panic. Cloud computing is the newest way of delivering IT applications and services. Like any new technology it has been spun and hyped and put into quadrants by every vendor and market watcher you can think of. The net result for CIOs is total confusion. So CIO and its editorial partners MWD have set out to make it clear what cloud computing offers as a technology by focusing on the most important issue of all, what is the business case? This CIO Debate is structured around two webinars that MWD have put together as well as a series of articles that will appear within the Debate channel of CIO UK, so please keep returning and watch our Twitter feed for the latest articles. You can listen to the webinars now here. We’ve chosen to focus on cloud computing because as Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD says, “In 2010 almost every vendor will offer a cloud product”. Ward-Dutton says “it is vital that CIOs understand how cloud fits your IT portfolio”. Throughout this Debate we plan to look at the business value that cloud computing offers, as well as the business risks from issues such as network reliability. It promises to be an interesting conversation and I hope many of you will contribute. To take part either follow CIO on Twitter to receive updates and comment on articles, register to leave comments on our articles or connect to our community on LinkedIn.