You can say what you want about the cloud and its faults. The CIO will say it lacks security. Vendors will tell you that it’s better to have your own private cloud. The linkbait kings will tell you the cloud is the bubble incarnate.

But the truth is best illustrated in what people are actually doing.

Read the AppFog post by Chris Tacey. He uses charts to show what has really happened over the past 12 years or so. In the 1990s, managed data centers came into vogue. By the turn of the century, virtualization decoupled the physical server.  In 2006, Amazon Web Services layered APIs on top of virtualized infrastructures.

Over the span of  the past 12 years, the costs to build a startup have decreased exponentially. Virtualization helped cut costs for servers. Scaling could be done in a more agile manner. AWS decoupled the costs even further, fueling a boom in startups.

We now see the impacts quite clearly. The core cloud infrastructure transforms the way developers work. Now that transformation is impacting the way people work in other production oriented professions.

Forrester’s James Staten points to the impact this new cloud infrastructure is having at the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference. The cloud is directly affecting how broadcasters do their work behind the scenes.

Attend, for instance, is a cloud service provider that provides  infrastructure through CloudSigma. Attend offers a video ingestion and collaboration service that is contracted on a per use basis. Studios use Attend as a service to do the acceleration, compression and storage that is needed during production. CloudSigma is known for its high performance infrastructure.

Staten also points to the Microsoft news about its Windows Azure Media Services. It’s a  full production environment, built entirely on the cloud with core capabilities for transcoding, encrypting, storing, streaming and commercializing content.

Our Cube team is at NAB all week, interviewing people about this transformation. Already, the differences are apparent compared to last year’s show. Yes, the cameras are hot but the excitement is also readily apparent about the infrastructure that takes the image from the camera to the production team working in the cloud who then delivers it to the viewing community.

That’s a major shift. It’s a shift to our workflow, a trend made possible by the cloud infrastructure developed over the past 10-15 years.