Recently at the Miami ITEXPO (News - Alert) 2011, TMC's Erik Linask had the opportunity to sit down and talk with 4PSA's CEO, Bogdan Carstoiu. Linask noted the interest in cloud communications these days is such that the conference had an entire track dedicated to it. Carstoiu said yes, much of the interest, in his opinion, is due to the flexibility it offers, for users as well as service providers.

"We were focused on cloud communications before the cloud became a cloud," Carstoiu said, over eight years. As far as who's driving the interest in cloud, Cairstoiu said service providers like it because they can scale their services more easily, and enterprise users like it because they only pay for what they use, "which is quite important these days."

Other benefits, besides cost efficiency and scalability, accruing from the usage of cloud-based services, include "the ability to use services for the right price, but without all the internal management." In cloud, he said, users can have the latest features every month, "depending on the provider. It's very important for them to be competitive as well."

Linask questioned Carstoiu on security, a prevalent concern for cloud computing. Carstoiu acknowledged that yes, "there is certainly a lot of debate about the security of the cloud," agreeing that in a shared medium there are a lot of problems that might occur.

"However, there are different approaches that help this, like private clouds. Our technology is used by service providers to partition the cloud, and to give to one customer access to specific resources. Of course they can repartition this to take advantage of other resources later." For large providers, he said, this is probably "a very good approach" to take to allay security concerns.