Cloud computing: Virtualization and resiliency for data center computing

Cloud computing is being rapidly adopted across the IT industry, driven by the need to reduce the total cost of ownership of increasingly more demanding workloads. Within companies, private clouds are offering a more efficient way to manage and use private data centers. In the broader marketplace, public clouds offer the promise of buying computing capabilities based on a utility model. This utility model enables IT consumers to purchase compute resources on demand to fit current business needs and scale expenses associated with computing resources. Thus, cloud computing offers IT to be treated as an ongoing variable operating expense billed by usage rather than requiring capital expenditures that must be planned years in advance. Advantageously, operating expenses can be charged against the revenue generated by these expenses directly. In contrast, capital expenses incurred by the purchase of a system need to be paid at the time of purchase, but can only be depreciated to reduce the taxable income over the lifetime of the system.