Michael Dean, head of marketing at the National Computing Centre, predicts that cloud computing will have a significant impact on the way businesses provide their employees with IT capabilities.
"There is a lot of hype around cloud computing - and it certainly is going to transform the way that IT is provisioned in organisations, without a shadow of a doubt," he says.
However, he adds that the number of companies successfully using cloud computing to its best advantage at present is relatively few.
Cloud computing can be implemented both on wired networks and using wireless communications.
It allows central pools of storage, shared resources and hosted applications to be accessed by end-users wherever they are on the network.
This sharing of applications can also facilitate the sharing of files and other information, making cloud computing environments conducive to greater collaboration.
