People still come up to me claiming that cloud computing is nothing but network computing with a "10-dollar word" attached to it. They're wrong, though: Cloud computing represents a fundamental shift in information technology, in myriad ways. If you're a security admin -- whether for applications or infrastructure -- your job is going to change.
There will be internal (private) and external (public) clouds that you will have to deal with, but they are so much more complicated than the traditional terms -- LAN, WAN, intranet, and extranet -- can describe. For one, the term cloud denotes a fuzziness about where the application bits and data are hosted. This is not only because of the business requirement for fault-tolerance and performance (which means the application servers and data are usually hosted at multiple locations), but also because virtualization is becoming almost an essential component of cloud computing.
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