  Businesses have become dependent on ever increasing amounts of electronic
information and rapid transaction speeds. Experts such as Diffie speculate that
the end of isolated computing is at hand, and that within the next decade most
businesses will have made the shift to utility computing. In order to cut costs
while still implementing increasingly complex Information Technology services,
many companies turned to Application Service Providers (ASPs). Due to poor
business models, over competition, and poor internet availability and
bandwidth, many ASPs failed with the dot com crash. Other ASPs, however, who
embraced web services architecture and true internet delivery were well placed
as early cloud adopters. With the expanded penetration and bandwidth of
internet services today, better business plans, and a wide divergence of
offering, cloud computing is avoiding the ASP downfall, and is positioned to
emerge as an enduring paradigm in computing
