With all this gushing enthusiasm for the cloud, and virtualisation of on-premise commodity servers running Windows or Linux, it’s sometimes easy to forget that big business still relies on very different hardware. Modern mainframes are not the room fillers of yesteryear, but still typify a technology strategy apparently at odds with the one pushed by many cloud advocates. Banks, governments, and big corporations continue to run old (sometimes ancient) mainframes, and (like Cameroon) to buy new ones. The two approaches may have more in common that seems likely at first glance, though. Writing in the Cloud Computing Journal, Denise Dubie quotes a 2010 survey showing “that 79 percent of 300 IT decision makers believed the ‘mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy.'”