Cloud computing technology (with BPOS and Windows Azure)

e see cloud computing offerings today that are suitable to host enterprise ar-chitectures. But while these offerings provide clear benefits to corporations by providing capabilities complementary to what they have, the fact that they can help to elastically scale enterprise architectures should not be understood to also mean that simply scaling in this way will meet twenty-first-century computing requirements. The architecture requirements of large platforms like social networks are radically different from the requirements of a healthcare platform in which geographically and corporately distributed care providers , medical devices, patients, insurance providers, clinics, coders, and billing staff contribute information to patient charts according to care programs, quality of service, and HIPAA constraints. The requirements for both of these are very different than those that provision straight-through processing services common in the financial services industry. Clouds will have to accommodate differences in architecture requirements like those implied here, as well as those relating to characteristics we subsequently discuss.