I recently posted about the Dizzying Economics of Cloud Computing when it occurred to me that the technological barriers must be equally mystifying for many. So I thought I would initiate a discussion about the barriers to the adoption of cloud computing by the enterprise. At stake are the valuations of a gathering storm of public companies in technology, from Cisco, Juniper, F5 Networks, VMware, IBM, VMware, Microsoft and Citrix to advertising player Google and bookseller Amazon. The shape of adoption and growth will be impacted by how these barriers are addressed. As I mentioned in “Dizzying Economics…” there is a business case war coming between the current cloud providers and the enterprise IT world. As these barriers are broken with innovation, cloud will move from consumer and SMB (small medium business) into larger and larger enterprise deployments. As a networking pundit, I see the three barriers in a network-centric perspective, from network security to the physical network and network management requirements.

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