hose expectations and descend into what Gartner dubs the
“trough of disillusionment.”
The latest technological breakthrough that is in danger of
spinning into a hype cycle is cloud computing. The cloud
generally refers to the scalable and dynamic provisioning of
“virtualized” IT applications and services, such as data storage,
over the Internet on a pay-as-you-use basis. Cheerleaders for
cloud computing claim it represents a sea change in the way
companies and consumers access and consume IT applica-tions and services.
In the traditional client/server approach, applications and
other IT infrastructure are maintained in-house or on the
desktop. In contrast, with cloud computing, software, IT plat-forms, storage or other infrastructure are provided “in the
cloud”—essentially, somewhere in the fathomless reaches of
the Internet—often by an external third party, which masks
the complexity of the underlying technical infrastructure
from the end user. To access the application, platform or in-frastructure, all the user requires is a web browser or, in some
cases, just an Internet connection