Abstract: “Cloud computing is an innovative, emerging and a novel phenomenon that paves the way for provisioning of infinitely scalable, re-usable, multipurpose, flexible, cost-saving, efficient and customizable on-demand information technology services and products. The promise of cloud computing is to deliver all the functionality of existing information technology services (and in fact enable new functionalities that are hitherto infeasible) even as it dramatically reduces the upfront costs of computing that deter many organizations from deploying many cutting-edge IT services . All such promise has led to lofty expectations — Gartner Research expects cloud computing to be a $150 billion business by 2014, and according to AMI partners, small and medium businesses are expected to spend over $100 billion on cloud computing by 2014. One recent survey of six corporate data centers found that most of the servers were using just 10–30% of their available computing power.”

Keywords: Cloud computing, Virtualization, Software as a service, Platform as a service, Infrastructure as a service.