The following is a guest post by Reese Jones.

The Cloud is an incredible step forward in data management and the age-old routine of backing up and syncing your files with your colleagues. Being able to commit code to a centralised place or uploading a new set of GUI elements, knowing that in minutes they'll sit on your programmer's computer ready to be implemented makes for a far more slick development process. But if you're a development team who hasn't yet dipped into the potential of cloud computing, then you're missing out.

According to ZDNet, “A true converged infrastructure is one that is not only pretested and preconfigured but also and more importantly pre-integrated; in other words it ships out as a single SKU and product to the customer.” Because the infrastructure is coming to you as a complete unit, you only need to contact the purchase vendor for support, rather than the manufacturers of the individual components, simplifying the support process.

According to data Gartner has gathered, Software-as-a-Service based applications (or cloud-based applications) are expected to see a growth of 17.4% globally by 2016 with the three fastest growing segments being Office Suites, Digital Content Creation and Business Intelligence.

As the industry grows to understand and embrace cloud computing, we begin to see a clearer picture of the expectations of cloud. Along with the typical expectations of scaling, provisioning and recovery, we are also discovering the importance of cloud automation. There are several components of a cloud automation platform and the practice is rapidly evolving to meet changing consumer demands.

In the many meetings that we have at customer sites, conferences, seminars, and other industry events, one conversation point that we continually come into is the difference between Cloud Computing and Virtualization. The “cloud” has become a term shrouded in confusion.  Many IT organizations position themselves to be “doing cloud” to satisfy the questions from the business and other executives, because they believe virtualization to be synonymous. While virtualization is an integral part of cloud computing, they are not the same thing.