Traditional IT providers are facing significant potential disruptions to their core businesses, including traditional on-premises enterprise applications vendors and potentially even incumbent IT infrastructure vendors. Given the key characteristics of the cloud (network-based access, usage-based pricing, leveraging of shared resources, automated provisioning), telcos would appear to be extremely well-positioned to benefit from the massive market opportunities that cloud computing will likely provide. However, significant challenges and barriers exist that will be difficult, even for larger telcos, to overcome.