A few months ago when I interviewed Ross Tisnovsky, vice president of research for Everest Group, about cloud computing, he mentioned an interesting cloud concept he called operations-as-a-service. While software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service seem like no-brainers for many companies, the infrastructure-as-a-service layer of the cloud stack is more problematic, Tisnovsky told me. He said:

I recently read an article by Anita Moorthy, Sr.Solutions Marketing Manager for Novell, Inc.  in which she articulates the results of a survey on what organizations want when purchasing SaaS products.

We use easily counterfeited identification, Social Security numbers that are written on the sides of buses and we rely on the anonymity of the phone, fax, internet and snail mail as a means of application. In other countries they solve problems. They have priorities and don’t deal with the rhetoric.  They put security first, convenience second...

The mechanical wonders that once used kerosene and chain drive squeegee rollers to mass produce wet-paper copies are long gone. It’s a digital copier these days that falls into a gray area between Classification of Documents and Enterprise Cyber Security.  As technology in the copy machine industry has evolved many of these systems now contain large hard drives which retain full and complete images of each and every copy made on the system...

Securing an organization's assets requires work, and there are many different ways to classify controls. This white paper examines three common types of controls are administrative, technical, and physical.

Microsoft CEO talks about new competition with Google, Amazon, and Salesforce, and why CIOs now are ready for cloud computing.

 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has sent a message of late that Microsoft is "all in" when it comes to cloud computing. In an interview with InformationWeek editors, Ballmer made clear that this all-in cloud computing bet isn't merely a long-term, over-the-horizon play. The cloud growth--"hockey stick" growth, he said -- is taking off right now. And Ballmer makes a passionate case for how the investment Microsoft has made in cloud computing products and infrastructure over the last five years makes it different from rivals Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.

We pushed to clarify--when does that hockey stick growth take off? We're not there yet, right? "I don't know. It sure feels like we're there today to me," Ballmer said. He added, however, that most lines of business software--industry-specific applications or transaction systems, for example--aren't going to the cloud en masse yet. Platform as a service offerings, like Microsoft's Azure, haven't taken off. But with what he calls "information worker infrastructure" -- think Exchange, SharePoint, and Office software -- CIOs are ready to move quickly to the cloud.

This weekend, BusinessWeek.com will feature our own Anthony M. Freed, Editor and Business Development Director for the Infosec Island Network.