This summer, F5 Networks surveyed 250 companies’ senior IT Personnel about Cloud Computing, and one thing is consistent – the definition of Cloud Computing continues to elude IT managers. In fact, the survey presented six industry-accepted meanings of cloud computing and found that the participants could not pinpoint any of them as being “just right”. The two most popular responses were:

• Cloud computing is on-demand access to virtualized IT resources that are housed outside of your own data center, shared by others, simple to use, paid for via subscription and accessed over the Web.

• Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud.”

Despite any confusion about the role cloud computing should play within IT organizations and how the solution will be carried out, it continues to gain momentum. In fact, 99% of the respondents to F5′s survey are actively discussing or implementing a cloud solution within their organization and more than half (66%) of the participants have budgets set aside for cloud solutions.

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