<p>One of the more popular arguments made against cloud computing is a perceived lack of useful standards, with assertions that the notion of portability from one provider to another is complex and not without significant work and cost considerations.</p><p>While this argument may have a certain degree of technical merit, it's apparent that the argument rings hollow. The growth of cloud computing shows no signs of slowing down: major providers display consistently strong growth. Gartner predicts worldwide cloud services spending to surpass $109 Billion in 2012 alone. In fact, large enterprises willingly choose multiple clouds, and it's illuminating to consider the reasons why this happens.</p><p>The entire premise of virtualizing your application infrastructure is to give you the ability to divorce your apps from your physical infrastructure on which they are hosted. This is in turn allows your application workloads to be dynamically placed and migrated across a pool of application server resources, which allows the infrastructure to dynamically adapt and respond to your evolving business needs.</p><p>If you look at traditional applications and how they are developed, it's clear they were not designed for the cloud, and they definitely don't take advantage of some of the best benefits a virtualized infrastructure can offer.</p><p><a href="http://www.wired.com/insights/2012/12/embrace-cloud-diversity-and-simplify-application-control/">Keep reading...</a></p>