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Th e M Rep o RT | 29 Feature C hange is difficult but often essential to survival." —Les Brown Cloud computing is the next big technological paradigm shift for organizations to stay com- petitive, remain profitable, and prosper in uncertain financial times. Technology has progressed from punch cards, to mainframes, to client-servers, to web-based approaches for importing, storing, processing, and producing data to drive business initiatives. With the continued evolution of pro- cessor capabilities, storage growth, and real-time information needs, organizations must transform their IT strategies if they are to remain relevant. The 2014 report Data Growth, Business Opportunities, and the IT Imperatives conducted by IDC and EMC reveals that the volume of total data we, as a society, create is doubling in size every two years. By 2020, the global volume of data will represent 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes. To put that number in context, the volume of textual data in the Library of Congress represents 15 terabytes of space, or roughly 0.000000015 zettabytes. Field services organizations are seeing a rapid increase in storage consump- tion from the millions of pictures, videos, emails, and data coming into their environments from myr- iad sources. These organizations are charged with storing multiple copies of each piece of data on their storage arrays, replication ar- rays, network storage devices, and backup media. The consumption, storage, and management of this volume of data is forcing field ser- vice organizations to change their strategy for data management. Field services IT departments must rapidly respond to changes in security, regulatory, compliance, and client needs within their IT infrastructure and IT applications. In addition, these IT environ- ments also must be agile enough to rapidly scale their environments up and down to meet changes to transaction volumes—while controlling costs—to ensure the profitability of the business. Cloud computing strategies provide the essential tools for IT organizations to gain scalability and agility within their organiza- tions while meeting the cost- control mandate. Although the idea of cloud computing has been around for over a decade, it has been only recently that this process of transitioning workloads to cloud environments has experienced a significant spike in the business world. Many businesses are mov- ing away from investing capital in data center environments and racks of physical servers toward co-located private cloud environ- ments or pure public cloud-based infrastructures. These businesses are gaining greater agility, scal- ability, and availability of their systems and business processes. With the field services industry's rapidly changing requirements and the need for secure data storage of millions of properties, these new technological approaches are criti- cal for business success. Cloud computing is generally categorized into three distinct approaches: public cloud, pri- vate cloud, and hybrid cloud. Because of increased scrutiny By Scott Anderson