With this recent cloud wave, we are seeing multi-million dollar investments in R&D from top-notch infrastructure companies and external collaborations with universities and IT companies. Cloud computing, being a service delivery model, is a combination of many sub-areas within computer science and information technology. From a research standpoint, research groups are grappling to solve critical problems in each of the sub-areas, namely virtualization, networks, storage, and compute architecture. These areas form the core of the cloud infrastructure, and are key in delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Research groups are also focusing on the software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) delivery models, which typically sit on top of the infrastructure. More on this here
