Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.
The term "cloud" is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online that are accessed from another Web service or software like a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.
(Source Wikipedia)
Cloud computing is addressed in the ICT work programme 2011/12 (p.15) under the following challenges/objectives:
> Challenge 1:Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures
Objective ICT-2011.1.2 Cloud Computing, Internet of Services and Advanced Software Engineering
- Intelligent and autonomic management of cloud resources, ensuring agile elastic scalability. Scalable data management strategies, addressing the issues of heterogeneity, consistency, availability, privacy and supporting security.
- Technologies for infrastructure virtualisation, cross platforms execution as needed for service composition across multiple, heterogeneous environments, autonomous management of hardware and software resources.
- Interoperability amongst different clouds, portability, protection of data in cloud environments, control of data distribution and latency.
- Seamless support of mobile, context-aware applications.
- Energy efficiency and sustainability for software and services on the cloud.
- Architectures and technologies supporting integration of computing and networking environments; implications of Cloud Computing paradigm on networks
- Open Source implementations of a software stack for Clouds
