The high rate at which information technology changes will continue to place a great deal of pressure on
organizations’ budgets. Continuous upgrades of software and hardware have become important items on many of
those organizations’ resource meetings and will continue to put pressure on the budgets of those organizations. This
situation is likely to be made worse in the current difficult economic conditions. However, cloud computing services
could provide many of those organizations with the opportunity to continue to take of new developments in
information technologies at affordable costs. Cloud computing is likely to be an attractive proposition to startup and
small to medium enterprises and educational establishments. The potential of cloud computing for improving
efficiency, cost and convenience for the educational sector is being recognized by a number US educational (and
official) establishments. The University of California (UC) at Berkeley, for example, found cloud computing to be
attractive to use in one of their courses which was focused exclusively on developing and deploying SaaS
applications. Helped by a donation from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Berkeley was able to move its course from
locally owned infrastructure to the cloud. One of the main reasons was quoted as being the ability to acquire a huge
amount of servers (needed for this course) in a matter of a few minutes (Fox, 2009). For some universities, the
availability of an awesome computing power through cloud computing for research purposes was welcome.
Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center in Milwaukee are
making protein research (a very expensive undertaking) more accessible to scientists’ worldwide, thanks largely to
renting processing time on Google’s powerful cloud-based servers.