Randy Arseneau, Platform Strategy Consultant at IBM responsible for go-to market strategy formulation, global storage platform sales enablement, portfolio positioning and analyst relations, stopped theCube not too long ago to give his take on the future of cloud computing.  He also discussed IBM’s role in the cloud, and the growing concerns around security. He shared his insight with Wikibon.org founder Dave Vellante (see full video below).

Arseneau expressed his view on the future of cloud computing in response to Vellante’s perspective on industry adoption of cloud computing.  Going by the latest signs, “we believe 2012 is going to the year of the cloud,” Arseneau says. The cloud is going to be become the standard mechanism for the delivering and consumption of information.”

On his company role in providing cloud services to industries, Arseneau said IBM is capable of designing systems to bring the benefits of cloud computing while avoiding the security and risk for small, medium to large sized businesses.

“IBM thinks cloud is fundamentally about very efficient, very agile, easy to provision, easy to manage, scalable, cost effective infrastructure that can be adapted at very granular level, can be optimized for workload, policy driven across wide user cases and workload and can be managed very easily.”

Arseneau noted that early cloud adopters were not very knowledgeable and most believed public cloud services from companies like Amazon, Rackspace and others were commercial and consumer oriented platforms that lack security, aren’t scalable and are tedious to implement. But with the evolution of the technology, people’s mindsets are changing.

The interview then turned to the concerns on security of cloud computing, a key concern for businesses looking to adopt cloud tools and services.

Looking at an IBM initiative to solve this problem, Arseneau note’s Big Blue’s expertise in introducing new technology, and is now providing the “best and most comprehensive” cloud service offerings to date. IBM is now offering enterprises of all sizes a way to host enterprise-class, cost-saving and security-rich cloud solutions that aide in business growth and productivity.

IBM plays a major role as cloud architectures and usage models.  For one, IBM SmartCloud allows users to create, update, maintain and even scale an enterprise-wide system in a cost effective way without the need to purchase new hardware.  And the new PureApplications System provides more automation for the network based computing devices.