The year of the platform – after years of working through Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and Software as a Service (SAAS)the coming of Platform as a Service (PAAS) marks the beginning of the realisation of the full benefit that the cloud approach has to offer.

Here Come Private Clouds – specially pertinent in the Public Sector, the information assurance requirements of governments and nations are driving an approach that sees the adoption of “national cloud” infrastructure.  This will challenge many of the cloud providers as issues around data sovereignty and legislation such as the US Patriot Act will force them to offer geographically local solutions (which is kind of counter intuitive to the purists architectural vision for cloud computing).

Security – What a surprise, the growth of cloud computing has lead to a new frontier to defend and secure.  whether it’s new concerns like Differential Privacy, or old “friends” moving to new platforms (the first cloud based bot-nets have recently been discovered).

Back in the Summer, Matt Deacon asked if I’d like to give a presentation on the subject of Cloud Computing to an Architect forum he was planning in the UK for September. I said “yes” immediately because I was getting increasingly frustrated with all the hyperbole about Cloud Computing being “the Future of IT” when all that was really being said was about cost containment and greater agility and frankly I wanted to prove that there really was more to it than that.

So, several weeks passed, the deadline loomed, and I set out to prove my theory that Cloud Computing would enable some significant outcomes that would transform society’s use of technology. Take a look to see how I got on…

You can download the webcast here (right click and “save as”) or click here to subscribe to the Envisioners podcasts on iTunes.

This presentation uses the superb Productivity Future Vision video generated by Microsoft’s Office Labs team. You can find this video (and get the background and more detail) here…

Finally, you can also download the slides I used here – like everything on this site, they’re available for use under Creative Commons license, so feel free use them if they’re helpful to you, but please respect the copyright of the image authors (see last slide in the deck) and ensure you are licensed properly for their use.