"Cloud Computing" Emerging Trends and the Effects on Environmental Compliance & Reporting "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service-provider interaction." -- US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) As the concept of "cloud computing" is still relatively new, it should come as no surprise that many people (76% of Americans, according to an Oct. 2009 study by Penn, Schoen & Berland, PSB), haven't heard the term yet or have heard the term but don't know what it really means. Even though I had been a user of various types of "cloud computing" services for several years, when I first heard the term I had no idea what it meant. Being a tech geek of sorts, I tend to re