As IT professionals look for new ways to create and support applications for their companies at lower cost, many are evaluating cloud computing. To help IT pros evaluate their options in this emerging market, InformationWeek is launching an editorial series that will break down and analyze the cloud model's basic components.

Our Anatomy Of The Cloud series will look at four fundamental approaches to cloud computing: private clouds, storage as a service, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service. In assessing the breadth and quality of the platforms and services available to users, we will issue requests for information to cloud vendors and evaluate their responses, explore case studies, and provide what-it-means-to-you analysis in the form of Impact Assessments.

InformationWeek will kick off the series on April 13 with an in-depth look at private clouds. That two-story package will include an article on how IT organizations can create private cloud architectures that meld with their virtualization strategies and a case study on General Electric's early efforts to create automated cloud environments in its data centers. This first part of Anatomy Of The Cloud will help IT pros get started developing their own private and "hybrid" clouds.

Part two of our series, slated for May, will evaluate the storage-as-a-service offerings from cloud service providers. Using the RFI approach, InformationWeek will provide an overview of the market, with details on participating vendors' service offerings, infrastructures, and licensing terms. You can download our storage-as-a-service RFI here (registration required). That story package will be followed later in the year with reports on infrastructure as a service and platforms as a service.

InformationWeek's Anatomy Of The Cloud series will be published in InformationWeek magazine and on our cloud computing site, PlugIntoTheCloud.com. The articles will also be expanded as downloadable reports on InformationWeekAnalytics.com.

For more information, contact John Foley at jpfoley@techweb.com.