The Cloud: Why should we care?

"Telling consumers their data is in the cloud is like telling a kid his dog has gone to doggie heaven." Best Quote from Cloud Control June 20, 2011 Time Magazine Vol. 177 No. 25 Article

What is this cloud thing? Is it another new fangled fad  fleeting about in the firmament only to burn out as more people discover it's just a fancy figment of some marketers imagination?  AI and TQM come to mind as fads that faded because the promises where greater than reality. But a lot of serious technologist feel it's a concept that is here to stay.
Recently IEEE organizational Newsletter -- The Institute -- had a special issue dedicated to cloud computing with a wealth of articles worth checking out. Specially the fact that standards needed to address issues of portability and interoperability. The Chesapeake Chapter of INCOSE even had Harry J. Foxwell, Ph.D.; Principal Consultant; Oracle Corp, and a self-proclaimed Cloud Philosopher, come to our meeting last year and give us his take on this phenomena. [Read the After Action Report >>HERE<<] And check his blog, "Dr Cloud's Flying Software Circus" for his latest comments on the latest news on all things cloud.  Great stuff. Need more technical insight? Check out Kurt Christensen's blog post from a year ago "Cloud Computing What’s the hype all about?" where he get's beyond the buzz and gets into the details. A lot of details. Stories abound on how effective the "cloud" can be. Take the story of how Animota was able to take the hit of 750000 new users by just increasing their use of Amazon servers. Is scale now irrelavent with the advent of the Cloud and  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?? As a SE are your working the "cloud" problem? or using the eventual results of this "cloud" phenomena into the system your developing? Either way we all will confront this massive shift in the IT paradigm. Good luck with that.

 Blog Extra: "IT'S CLOUD COMPUTING" is the parody by "Loose Bruce" Kerr via Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" Really Funny. Enjoy