With the conference season already being in its full swing, people attending major industry events are eager to hear and see what’s coming next in terms of technology and applications. One of many, but popular topics is cloud computing. Some might say: sounds familiar, what’s new? Clearly, the momentum continues. Service providers and vendors are addressing the cloud from many more different perspectives now compared to the past. So has happened at the MPLS & Ethernet World Congress in Paris and at the Lambdanet Forum in Frankfurt last week. Cloud computing was one of the main themes at both events, with speakers presenting new solutions and discussing their experience in the field.

Everybody agreed that the rise of cloud services has started and that the consumption of services sourced from the cloud became reality in both our business and private life. With the success and wide-scale adoption, cloud service providers are facing new questions and are looking for opportunities to differentiate and scale their service offering.

Many cloud service providers have started to plan their services portfolio more carefully than they initially did. This applies particularly to the traditional network operators who complemented their telecom portfolio by cloud services. They want to better understand who their cloud customers are, what cloud services are important to these potential customers and which can be addressed by their sales organization. Also the impact on their existing network, OSS and BSS landscape is an important fact to assess what ultimately provides efficiency and differentiation.

One challenge with cloud computing is the dependency on an Internet whose performance can vary from hour to hour. MPLS and Carrier Ethernet are considered as alternatives for providing access into the cloud with dependable quality of service metrics. Many operators are looking for ways to scale their services at reasonable cost while leveraging existing infrastructure. Areas of concern are how to adapt virtual private network solutions, what quality of service is required and what are the service level agreements seamlessly matching those of the cloud applications. Network security issues in the context of denial of service attacks also become more dominant.

Last but not least, the service control view has developed to be a frequently discussed subject in the context of cloud computing. How can we give cloud applications control over the network to allocate sufficient resources at the time they are required? In the age of virtualization, which successfully has been adopted for storage and compute resources in the data center, the inclusion of the communication network promises to enable new business models and efficiencies. Control plane and Openview are relevant technologies here.

All in all, lots of good thoughts and great ideas to maintain the momentum of cloud services – also on the standards side. All relevant standards bodies have ongoing activities helping to simplify and scale cloud offerings. Ultimately, there’s only one last question: What comes after the cloud? Some people say: The sky …