We created this infographic for Orange Business Services because there is so much confusion around the term Cloud computing: to some people its apps, to others its servers, to others it just means “on demand”.

The truth is that is all these things and more.

The boffins in Orange Labs see a multitude of Clouds emerging so we want to show this vision, but also trace it’s history.  Cloud computing is not a revolution as such as you can trace emergence back to the first days of the internet. It’s really a story about how IT has evolved.

It was first published on the Orange Business Live blog here and there is a really cool version on Slideshare here. It interesting to compare the two formats.

Thanks to the designers who worked on the different formats, Rose Zgodzinski and Mark Jaeckel.

An interesting article in the latest McKinsey Quarterly has identified 10 technology-enabled business trends that it says is reshaping enterprises worldwide. Many of the trends are close to our heart at Orange Business Live! and the article follows on from a similar piece from McKinsey written two-and-a-half years ago. The 10 technology trends it has identified are:

• Distributed co-creation moves into the mainstream: using the web to bring communities of interest together and collaborate for product development, marketing or customer support. This trend has grown out of the success of initiatives such as Open Source software development andWikipedia;

• Making the network the organization: opening the borders of the enterprise or functional groups to enable wider collaboration towards common goals. Other networks include online labor markets such as Mechanical Turk or advertising contest services such asZoopa;

• Collaboration at scale: the increasing importance of collaboration technology and tools to help knowledge workers increase their efficiency and boost overall “organizational capital”;

• The growing ‘Internet of Things’: we cover this topic regularly in the blog – most recently in an interview with Geoffrey Zbinden from Orange. It is where objects are equipped with sensors and communication capability and can make processes more efficient or create new business models;

• Experimentation and big data: with the amount of data captured and processed by enterprises ever increasing there is a potential to glean business intelligence and redesign business processes on the fly or keep on top of rapidly changing market trends;

• Wiring for a sustainable world: this trend refers to the continuing importance of green IT and the push towards IT for green, which has been extensively covered by Orange blogger Axel Haentjens, for example here;

• Imagining anything as a service: there’s little doubt that cloud computing is a major trend in enterprise computing and software as a service and infrastructure as a service have entered the general lexicon. Network service providers have been tipped as future leaders here by analysts Ovum as I wrote last week in the blog;

• The age of the multisided business model: this refers to new business models that don’t fit into the neat B2B or B2C categories, such as the “freemium” model, where some customers get free services supported by those who pay a premium for special use – Flickr is an example of this;

• Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid: the increasing importance of innovation in developing markets, such as rural Africa, where mobile banking is taking hold in a big way. Again covered in Live!;

• Producing public good on the grid: the final trend is the role of technology in imporving public service, such as e-Government or even initiative such as FixMyStreet.com, where citizens can report problems such as flytipping.

This article first appeared in Orange Business Live! http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2010/09/mckinsey-indentifies-collaboration-internet-of-things-and-cloud-as-key-business-technology-trends.html

In addition to writing text at Futurity Media, we’re also doing video and audio. This is an example of a recent podcast that we did with Orange Business Services in Herndon Virginia. We were talking to Current Analysis analyst Amy Larsen DeCarlo about cloud computing from an enterprise viewpoint. Where is the technology heading? What applications are suited to it? How are early adopters using it?

Cloud computing is a staggeringly popular topic. Huge swathes of the work we did in 2009 related to cloud computing services and the trend looks set to continue into next year. Just about all parts of the information communications technology (ICT) industry are positioning themselves to take advantage of the predicted stratospheric growth. Although all hyped technologies will get their comeuppance at some point, cloud computing is unlikely to make much headway in enterprises if it they are worried about security.

Enterprise concerns over security are perfectly understandable: as a shared medium, how can they be sure that their data isn’t leaking into their competitors environment, and in fact are they even able to tell were their data is even stored. The latter issue can have a major regulatory impact in a number of areas, such as PCI-DSS compliance. Hackers are already reportedly rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of hacking cloud computing environments. At the recent Black Hat conference, speakers demonstrated how to attack the cloud and a Trojan keylogger was reportedly found on Amazon’s AWS site only this week.

Given the importance of security to cloud computing’s success there’s little surprise that the industry is making solving the issue a priority. Here are some interesting resources & articles:

• The European Network and Information Security Agency has published a report on the risks of cloud computing;
• The Jericho Forum famous for its work on deperimeterisation published a white paper on cloud computing security earlier this year;
• In June, Jericho Forum and the Cloud Security Alliance joined up to address security. I was expecting to see a result on this collaboration in the autumn, but I haven’t seen anything yet;
• Ariel Silverstone suggests some metrics for measuring the security of your cloud computing providers;
• ISACA has published a white paper that looks at some of the security issues;
• The CSA and Novell are running an interesting looking webinar on Cloud security next week.