I’ve read numerous articles about cloud computing over recent months, some promoting the advantages and other questioning the benefits. A story in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye last week, which was headlined: “To Cloud, or Not to Cloud”.

The author of the piece provided some interesting takes around different areas that companies should consider as they make a decision on whether to move into the cloud. The story was balanced, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of the cloud.

Although many of the points in both the positive and negative columns were valid, I have a couple of key takeaways that further confirm to me that cloud is the way to go:

Cloud has been the buzzword for some time in technology. I’m delighted to have recently joined IntraLinks, which has been leading the charge since the beginning. That’s why it was great to see the article and the followup blog post in The New York Times last Friday that discussed the growing adoption of Cloud Services in B2B and the awareness around the benefits of cloud computing.

With recent movie releases like Tron and mega-tradeshows like CES, the Consumer Electronic Show, technological innovations appear to know no bounds. Tablets, 3D-TVs and über-networked gaming consoles are all the rage. The operative word in that tradeshow’s name, however, is “Consumer”. Consumer electronics generate those wow effects, prodding us all to buy new gadgets while wondering exactly for what purpose!

Technology innovations in the corporate world elicit less of a visceral response but can be equally as exciting and transformative. Often, the level of hype surrounding such potentially transformative technologies far outpaces an enterprise’s ability to integrate those advances into their business processes. Nevertheless, there are three technologies that appear to be living up to the hype — cloud, mobile and collaboration. This became even clearer to me when I recently attended Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Symposium 2010, with these three technologies taking center stage during the conference.

Today’s challenging business environment has brought the importance of delivering world-class investor servicing sharply into focus. Institutional investors expect to access their statements and capital calls online, anytime, from anywhere, placing additional pressure on the related management and delivery mechanisms used by private equity firms.

The recent conference, Private Equity Software and Service Provider Showcase organized by 4VCO at the Renaissance Chancery Court hotel in London, therefore provided an excellent opportunity for 150 private equity professionals to gather for a day of presentations, information sharing and networking to understand how technology helps funds to improve internal systems and operations.

This is the next in a series of guest blog posts by IntraLinks’ collaborators, partners, and vendors. Andreas Grabner is Sr. Architect and Technology Strategist at dynaTrace. dynaTrace is a technology leader in application performance management (APM). IntraLinks selected dynaTrace Continuous Application Performance Management to improve the operation of IntraLinks’ platform during the production lifecycle in September of 2009.

The Cloud has become the hot topic in the past year, with many major technology leaders (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, SalesForce.com, etc.) extensively promoting public cloud services. What is equally interesting is the growth of the so-called “private cloud”: whether large enterprises transitioning their datacenter infrastructure to cloud-based paradigms; or solution providers using their own cloud-based platforms to provide solutions more efficiently.