sentences: Recently the cloud computing paradigm has been receiving significant excitement and attention in the media and blogosphere. To some, cloud computing seems to be little more than a marketing umbrella, encompassing topics such as distributed computing, grid computing, utility computing, and softwareas-a-service, that have already received significant research focus and commercial implementation. Nonetheless, there exist an increasing number of large companies that are offering cloud computing infrastructure products and services that do not entirely resemble the visions of these individual compo-