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"The fog comes on little cat feet," Carl Sandburg wrote way back in 1916. But a hundred years later, a similar atmospheric disturbance -- the cloud -- has hoofed its way into data centers far less delicately. Cloud-based data storage, cloud computing and a whole bunch of services ending in aaS have made their presences felt, casting a shadow over on-premises infrastructure. Today, the hype has cooled a bit, and scores of cloud services have proved their utility or, in some unfortunate cases, failed spectacularly. In other words, there are winners and losers, and the cloud storage and services market is starting to look pretty normal. Another 'place' or state of mind? To assuage IT pros suffering from cloudaphobia, many experts said the cloud concept is quite simple: It's just another place to put data and run apps, like another data center or remote site. That might've talked some antsy data center hacks off the ledge, but in truth, the cloud isn't so familiar, and cloud services are likely to change traditional IT roles and ...