Lately, I have been working a lot in the cloud, not the puffy and white kind, but the virtual kind, and I have started to see that we are at major inflection point in the technology continuum.

As most of us in the technology field have heard about cloud (if not, then you must have been solo sailing around the world with no outside communication), the cloud is here to stay.

Most of the time when I speak about cloud in Asia, most people just don’t see how cloud is going to benefit them.

It’s a fair question to ask as most technical people have heard the hype that our industry spouts off about, without realizing the tangible results.

The best example I can give is to take you game console, with the graphics, memory and disk space and place it into a virtual computer. Then image that you have a persistent, reliable connection to the internet that is always on, like electricity.

Now image that the games you play are no longer reliant on the hardware of your gaming box. All the power is in the cloud.

In the future, when you want to play a new game, all you have to do is select and pay for the game. The game will be instantly made available. Want to see the latest graphics, no problem, the game is rendered in the cloud and displayed on your game console. No need to upgrade and for all intensive purpose, any device that has a “always-on”, reelable internet connection, will be able to show the game in all of it’s glory.

That is when the cloud becomes the device.

Stay tuned as in the next entry, I’ll dive into how governance is impacted by the cloud.