The topic cloud computing, still demands a lot of debate and conflicting opinions, it is already becoming reality. Every day we see the ecosystem built around cloud computing and to consolidate, more and more success stories are published.

I will not quote statistics and forecasts that always come from industry analysts, who provide these stats and estimates agree with each other in numbers.

The three layers of cloud, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS can be viewed as a hierarchy, where the lower layer has IaaS, above it we have the top SaaS and PaaS. The upper layers are built upon the layers below. The benefits obtained are directly related to the layer. That is, the higher the layer, the greater the potential benefits. IaaS can be considered as the commoditized layer, as it basically provides a virtual infrastructure, the users are abstracting the physical equipment. But offers no content. SaaS, in turn, enables a higher level of abstraction, because the User sees only the features of the software without needing to know what technology it uses and need not even bother with version upgrades.

The most emblematic example is the force.com that lets you create applications that extend the functionality of the salesforce. We will see later PaaS is consolidating itself, with its own technologies, separate from SaaS vendors. This will happen with maturity in the use of cloud services, when companies use the SaaS PaaS coupled to identify who will be imprisoned on these platforms.

But it is indisputable that we are still learning to exploit the potential of cloud computing and we will learn much more in the coming years. The first projects have been exploratory, which is natural. What we will see this year? Clouds filled with typical workloads to be outsourced via SaaS and on-premise applications transferred to IaaS clouds. But, although limited in their impact, are paving the way for the full adoption of the model. In fact, the cycles of technological change takes take several years to mature in 2020 and probably cloud computing is commonplace. But if this will happen in 2020, the first steps should be taken now in 2012. Cloud computing is a reality now and should already be on the radar of the IT managers of all firms.