On Tuesday, the Colorado chapter of SIM (Society for Information Management) had a panel discussion on Cloud Computing. I was asked to serve on the panel and thoroughly enjoyed the event.
I could write up a summary, but Julie Bort did a fine job in her article
Cloud computing is cheaper, greener but not yet enterprise ready.
Julie is an online editor for NetworkWorld, and she was the moderator for the event. A very effective leader for the panel, a good writer, and a wonderful person missed by all her friends in Keystone.
The conclusion that cloud computing is not enterprise ready mainly came from CIO/CTO comments in the room that they could not take the risk of putting their enterprise apps (e.g. ERP) on a platform that only has 99% reliability. There was debate about how these enterprises feel they can secure access to the data better than a company that specializes in hosting.
I would also add that many companies are using cloud infrastructure as a means of hosting, but they are not getting the prime benefit of “elasticity of horsepower” because their apps were not architected to do so. LoadStorm is written from the ground up to run on Amazon EC2, and it dynamically allocates load testing generators by asking for new EC2 instances on the fly.