General Consultant Discussion

90% surveyed give thumbs up to cloud computing: Seventy-five percent of the group said they valued strong customer service and technical support over higher hosting prices. Twenty-five percent said the opposite. Interestingly, that ratio didn't change relative to the size of the organization. Top concerns: The ability to add computing power; the ability to move data easily between cloud providers; the pitfalls of vendor lock-in. Forty-three percent said they are aware of people in their organization using cloud computing services not provided by the IT department for work. Thirty-eight percent said saving time was the main driver for this behavior. Just one in three acknowledged that it was because the IT department didn't offer comparable services or employees simply didn't want to deal with the IT department. Finally, 48 percent of the polled IT pros said yes, they would take a job with a new company that does not use cloud computing. (Twenty-eight percent said no way; 24 percent were undecided.) It's unclear whether this shows IT pros who seek a challenge, or who simply fail to see value in the cloud. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/cloud-computing-9-in-10-are-positive-on-it-survey-says/80892?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ZDNetBlogs+%28ZDNet+All+Blogs%29

Alot of the articles essentially comingle hosting & SaaS. 2 very different things

A new Rackspace survey"" - it is very easy to get the statistics you want when the desired answer of the person writing the check is obvious.

I would anticipate many IT professionals resisting cloud computing: 1) There is a perceived risk in not maintaining full control over critical data (weather valid or not), 2) Moving apps to the cloud could potentially reduce the need for an internal IT staff (self-preservation), 3) Connectivity between applications and other systems remains a significant issue in many SaaS solutions, 4) Tailoring an application to the needs of an organization to support proprietary tools, processes or other intellectual property that gives the organization a competitive advantage in their market space is easier to achieve in on-premises system today than in SaaS offerings on average. (This will change over time.) 5) Change is hard for everyone and physics reminds us that a body at rest will tend to stay at rest, resisting changes in its current state.