Section 2. The key advantages of cloud computing
Many of the incipient ideas in cloud computing are not exactly new (in fact, it was as far back as 1965 that Western Union dreamt up the future role of the company as a nationwide “information utility” as part of the company's strategic plans ), which have led several observers such as Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison to declare the whole concept as a product of hype.2 While it is true that several of the above ideas were indeed present for a long time, we nonetheless argue that their confluence today in an environment where information can be accessed independent of device and location computing offers the following key advantages: