Everybody knows the cloud is coming, and believe it or not, most people have at least a vague idea of what it’s about and how it can improve enterprise computing.

But how many of us have given any thought as to how it will change our working environment? That is, what changes does the cloud have in store for IT infrastructure?

Greg Ness, marketing executive at Infoblox, has been thinking about it a lot lately. He just spun off a new blog from his regular Archimedius Report to talk specifically about cloud computing and how it will usher in an era of dynamic networking, which he dubs (shame on you, Greg) Infrastructure 2.0.

Ness’ take is that networking professionals need to think seriously about re-purposing their static environments to more flexible architectures better suited to the growing legions of users who are already embracing clouds and cloud services and are not interesting in hearing that the resources they need are not available. If the twin ideas of system and endpoint automation are only now just dawning on you, it’s time to start doing some research to get up to speed fast because the struggling economy is going to force these and other dynamic changes on you real soon.

Networking vendors need to take stock of their places in the market as well. The increasing gap between network capabilities and user demand will leave many in the dust – once again, due to significant demand reduction of static hardware systems that may provide a temporary increase in network capacity or performance but do nothing to improve either scalability or flexibility.

To meet the demands of virtualization and the cloud, networks of the future will rely heavily on automation and “connectivity intelligence,” rather than the constant march toward faster throughput and wider bandwidths.

It’s a tall order, but necessity is the mother of invention.