Introduction to the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing

elcome to the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC).It is my privilege and honor to serve as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of TCC.I would like to thank the IEEE and the world-wide Cloud Computing community for giving me the opportunity to serve them.Let me first share some of the open opportunities and challenges in Cloud Computing and then introduce the transactions and its progress. Opportunities and ChallengesComputing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are commoditized and delivered in a manner similar to utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony.In such a model, users access services based on their requirements regardless of where the services are hosted.Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision.Cloud computing is the most recent emerging paradigm promising to turn the vision of "computing utilities" into reality.Cloud computing started with a risk-free concept: Let someone else take the ownership of setting up of IT infrastructure and let end-users tap into it, paying only for what is been used.A service offering computation resources is frequently referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the applications as Software as a Service (SaaS).An environment used for construction, deployment, and management of applications is called PaaS (Platform as a Service).