Guest editorial: special section on advances of utility and cloud computing technologies and services

The articles in this special section focus on advancements of utility and cloud computing technologies and services. Computing is rapidly moving towards a model where it is provided as services that are delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services according to their requirements, without regard to where the services are hosted or how they are delivered. Several computing architectures have evolved to realize this utility computing vision, including Grid computing, Service- Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud computing,which has recently shifted into the center of attention in the ICT industry. Increasing numbers of IT vendors are promising to offer applications, storage and computation hosting services with conforming Service-Level Agreement