INFN towards Cloud Computing

The Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) has a long experience in the field of distributed scientific computing, mainly in the framework of GRID computing. In the last two years an interest towards the cloud computing paradigm has arisen inside the INFN scientific and technological communities, leading to the growth of new activities aiming at creating a new distributed computing environment that takes advantage of the flexibility offered by cloud technologies. In this contribution we will give an overview of the activities carried out by the INFN IT community in this direction and we will highlight the key aspects still under evaluation in view of a possible adoption of the cloud for scientific computing.