Cloud Computing Towards Technological Convergence

With the popularization and improvement of social and industrial IT development, information appears to explosively increase, and people put much higher expectations on the services of computing, communication and network. Today’s public communication network is developing in the direction that networks are widely interconnected using communication network infrastructure as backbone and Internet protocols; at the same time, cloud computing, a computing paradigm in the ascendant, provides new service modes. Communication technology has the trend of developing towards computing technology and applications, and computing technology and applications have the trend of stepping towards service orientation architecture. Communication technology and information technology truly comes to a convergence. Telecom operators are planning to be providers of comprehensive information services in succession. To adopt cloud computing technology not only facilitates the upgrade of their communication network technology, service platform and supporting systems, but also facilitates the construction of the infrastructure and operating capacity of providing comprehensive information services. In this paper, the development processes of public communication network and computing are reviewed along with some new concepts for cloud computing. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0879-5.ch7.3