Over the last month Rick Blaisdell, CTO of ConnectEdu, an education and career management site for students, parents, counselors, teachers, and administrators, has published a series of well informed articles on Wikibon.org discussing the basic issues of cloud computing. Drawing both on extensive personal experience and research, he has published a series of excellent articles discussing such topics as the need for coding skills, security online, and the business drivers that make cloud computing the future of IT.

In his latest piece, “Thoughts on Enterprise Cloud Computing,” Blaisdell briefly discusses the major cloud service vendors and provides links to two lists of vendors. He also explains some of the basic terms, such as “virtual machine.” He also provides links to a list of virtualization platforms and a link to a cloud service cost calculator provided by Amazon.

Blaisdell’s posts are unusual in that he is a neutral party, not a spokesperson for a cloud service provider or an analyst or consulting company. His viewpoint is that of an IT professional in a user company, and his articles reflect the concerns and questions he had as he led his company through the process of integrating cloud resources into their IT infrastructure.

To see all of Blaisdell’s informative pieces, go to www.wikibon.org and search for “Blaisdell”. These pieces, like everything posted at Wikibon.org, are made available free of charge by the Wikibon community.