Cloud computing is the definitely the buzz word these days. The recent global financial meltdown is said to be a significant reason for the manifestation of this new paradigm for obvious reasons of cost efficiency, flexibility, scalability blah, blah & blah. But many in the academic and research fraternity do not agree with the above point. Their argument is that like any other innovation the time has come for Cloud Computing to transcend from the innovation phase to the Utility phase.

So, according to ‘them’ the global meltdown fuelling the use of this paradigm is just no more than a coincidence. There is a ton of research being done in various fields like Technology Adoption, Information Security and Organizational Behavior. Like any other innovation there are early adopters of technology and later adopters of the technology. The early adopters are usually characterized by their risk-seeking or entrepreneurial mindsets and late adopters by their risk-averse mindsets. What is interesting is to see if the above mentioned mindset, let’s call it ‘Perceived Risk’ linearly reduces with time or not and what factors mediate this relationship. This definitely will have implications on the success or failure of an innovation and can be useful to innovators and technology adopters alike. There is an awesome video (2 parts) from a CloudCamp session in Frankfurt where Simon Wardley from Canonical, Sponsors for Ubuntu talks about the state of confusion when it comes to understanding what Cloud Computing really is. He describes how this paradigm of computing wasn’t realized overnight, how it traveled through the different phases that any innovation usually does and why its’ time really has come. Totally recommend it.