One of the greatest moments a cloud evangelist indulges in occurs at that point a listener experiences an intuitive leap of understanding following your explanation of cloud computing. No greater joy and intrinsic sense of accomplishment.

Government IT managers, particularly those in developing countries, view information and communications technology (ICT) as almost a "black" art. Unlike the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, or other countries where Internet and network-enabled everything has diffused itself into the core of Generation "Y-ers," Millennials, and Gen "Z-ers." The black art gives IT managers in some legacy organizations the power they need to control the efforts of people and groups needing support, as their limited understanding of ICT still sets them slightly above the abilities of their peers.

But, when the "users" suddenly have that right brain flash of comprehension in a complex topic such as cloud computing, the barrier of traditional IT control suddenly becomes a barrier which must be explained and justified. Suddenly everybody from the CFO down to supervisors can become "virtual" data center operators – at the touch of a keyboard. Suddenly cloud computing and ICT becomes a standard tool for work – a utility.

How does a small or medium business ensure it can meet the basic needs for disaster recovery and business continuity? Whether it be Internet-facing applications, or Enterprise-facing applications and data, one of the most important issues faced by small companies is the potential loss of information and applications needed to run their operations.

Disaster recovery and business continuity. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Backing up data to offsite locations, and potentially running mirrored processing sites - it is an expensive business requirement to fulfill. Particularly for budget conscious small and medium-sized companies.

Christoph Streit, founder of Hamburg-based ScaleUp Technologies, believes cloud computing may offer a very cost-effective, powerful solution for companies needing not only to protect their company's data, but also reduce their recovery point objectives to near zero.

CA and 3tera have announced CA's acquisition of the innovative cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service vendor. This is a great thing for Computer Associates, and perhaps a bit sad for the cloud community in general. Why? It is hard to fit the energy and enthusiasm felt when walking into 3Tera's Aliso Veijo office into words. A tight group of committed entrepreneurs and innovators, with a bit of cockiness due to the unique stature they held in the cloud computing community.

Not that Computer Associates is a bad company. In fact, they have always been one of the best kept secrets in business and enterprise software. Rock solid systems, professional sales and engineering - just not as well known to the broader community as other large enterprise systems vendors.

AppLogic brought the cloud community many firsts. The first to integrate IPv6 into their provisioning system. The first to really simplify the drag and drop provisioning process. Perhaps the first to really test and prove the concept of globally distributed processing and disaster recovery models. And they are really great guys.

Vietnam is in the process of upgrading the entire country's IT system. With support from organizations such as the World Bank, Vietnam is rebuilding not only physical infrastructure, but also starting from the ground up building new IT systems - including a large scale virtualization strategy.

Hawaii may not be so progressive. The first line of an Associated Press story on Hawaii's lack of a functional IT strategy goes like this:

"In many ways Hawaii's government runs its computers like the Internet age hardly happened." (AP)

The story goes on to expose Hawaii's lack of IT policy, the fact they are using old systems, a mixture of Apple and PCs for individual users, have a 1960s version of disaster recovery (offsite physical diskette storage), and other parallels with industry that add more discouraging evidence to Hawaii's IT shortfalls.

A full WebEx-based conference call helped kick off the new Omnikron Cloud Training and Introduction series. Interest and participation surprised everybody, highlighting an industry need, and tremendous interest in both the technology and economics of cloud computing.

Attendees represented a wide range of backgrounds, industries, and employment status, including consultants from "Big 5" corporations, healthcare, research, entertainment, and government offices.  Several attendees were recently load off, and realize this might be a great opportunity to refresh their qualifications in the cloud space, ready for the time when companies resume hiring.

The incentive for Omnikron is bringing a new vision to our community, and providing both thought leadership and real recommendations to attendees on how they might approach their own cloud strategy.

The message from the VC community is clear - "don't waste our seed money on network and server equipment." The message from the US Government CIO was clear - the US Government will consolidate data centers and start moving towards cloud computing. The message from the software and hardware vendors is clear - there is an enormous investment in cloud computing technologies and services.

If nothing else, the economic woes of the past two years have taught us we need to be a lot smarter on how we allocate limited CAPEX and OPEX budgets. Whether we choose to implement our IT architecture in a public cloud, enterprise cloud, or not at all - we still must consider the alternatives. Those alternatives must include careful consideration of cloud computing.

Cloud 101 teaches us that virtualization efficiently uses compute and storage resources in the enterprise. Cloud 201 teaches us that content networks facing the Internet can make use of on-demand compute and storage capacity in close proximity to networks. Cloud 301 tells us that a distributed cloud gives great flexibility to both enterprise and Internet-facing content. The lesson plan for Cloud 401 is still being drafted.

Having gone through a couple of decades worth of technology conferences, a familiar cycle occurs. For the first couple years, technology-related conferences are attended by engineers and operations people. Only after the technology has passed a couple of feasibility gates and begun to hit the business cycle do sales and marketing people take over. Cloud is now officially past the engineering phase, well into the sales phase - and the business community is scrambling to understand the implications of a virtualized world.

At the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California, the opening keynote session venue was completely filled, with the organizer (SYS-CON Events) obliged to quickly expand the audience into two overflow rooms, in addition to mounting displays in hallways adjacent to the main ballroom. According to the conference organizer more than twice as many have signed up and are attending the conference than planned. And cloud "buzz" is electric within the halls.

Cloud computing is here, the industry innovation machine is spooling, and the "nay-sayers" are starting to quiet down as the reality of cloud computing is articulated, codified, and presented in a format that has finally gone past the high level "concepts" of recent cloud expos and conferences.

"If we look at cloud (service) in a global sense, not just as my service or your service, or my country or your country, then IPv6 is part of the future and the solution." (Bert Armijo, SVP 3tera)

IPv6 is hitting everybody in the Internet industry on a global scale. 3tera recognized early in the evolution of cloud products that IPv6 was critical for long term, and short term development of their AppLogic product within both public-facing Internet services, as well as cloud deployments within the enterprise. The need is real.

The IPv4 Reality 3tera Faced

Cloud interoperability and security drove passionate discussions among presenters and attendees at Cloud User '09 in San Diego this week.  A very good mix of professionals representing equipment vendors, cloud service providers, cloud software and systems developers, government, and the media rolled up sleeves, put egos aside, and drilled into issues that are impeding broad acceptance of cloud services.

The conference, sponsored by MarcusEvans, brought a lot of really interesting perspectives to the issues surrounding cloud provisioning, regulatory concerns, marketing, and the technology of cloud.  The objective - determine a course of action in the cloud community to promote and provide confidence needed for the general information and communications (ICT) community to adopt cloud services.

Igor Edelman, representing a financial services company which is an early adopter of cloud computing (he'd prefer to keep the company confidential, however I can say I am a customer!), discussed his security concerns. 

Just 18 months ago the concept of cloud computing was still an abstract to most in the IT and data center community.  In fact, those who had even heard of cloud computing were a tiny minority of IT professionals.

This morning, 17 July 2009, Google listed 177 news stories with the topic or subject of cloud computing posted within the past 24 hours.  Whether you believe the cloud computing story is real or not, hype or reality, a larvae of technical reality, you cannot escape the excitement cloud computing is bringing to the technical community.

Even the Wall Street Journal is now devoting a fair amount of space to the topic, with recent stories highlighting projects including Microsoft initiatives, Larry Ellison (Oracle), Google, and HP.  It seems that every company that has any vision or feels they need some quick PR is launching a story or press release on cloud computing.  The past 24 hours present a roll call of cloud talk (from a query on Google News) including: