By Brian Klingbeil, MD EMEA, Savvis

Last year’s economic downturn has seen traditional ‘DIY’ organisations radically reassess their approach to IT management. Many enterprises have starting to shift budgets to flexible, service led purchasing of IT infrastructure as they identify that moving to managed infrastructure can reduce capital expenditure and costs whilst increasing business flexibility.

Enterprises are also evaluating if this is the time to shift to cloud based infrastructure so as to capitalise quickly on the recovery opportunity. IT professionals are also learning how to assess which elements of their architecture are ripe for taking into the cloud.

2010 is the year for Cloud Seeding. Those ‘in the know’ understand that you can now trust the cloud with mission critical applications, meaning enterprise cloud adoption will start in earnest this year. Making the right decision on when to shift to cloud based infrastructure is very important as it will then help businesses to capitalise from the beginnings of the upturn and insulate themselves somewhat from the risk of a W shaped recovery. With enterprises commencing their engagement their first cloud projects, they begin to understand better the benefits of cloud computing.

The benefits for Cloud Computing as we all know are enormous, including cost-effective approaches to some of the common key challenges that confront IT organizations on a daily basis such as

• How can we provide a better end-user experience at the lowest cost?

• How can we meet availability and other SLA-based requirements?

• How can we deal more effectively with the outages that will inevitably occur?

That said, IT professionals evaluating cloud services must understand the policy implementation mode they are buying into. They need to think about how much control they need at the resource, application and operational levels – and then make sure that it’s available. Organisations and IT leaders that take an over-simplified view of cloud computing and commit to it without fully understanding the implications of such a move risk making things worse instead of better.

Moving forward, the year 2010 will be the centred around cloud governance. IT organisations need to fully understand the implications of a move towards Cloud Computing rather than dive in without a plan. Only when IT professionals stay on top of the cloud by fully understanding the implications of a move towards Cloud Computing, possess a detailed understanding of decision-making policies across resources, applications and operations, then will they be able to look forward to reaping the much anticipated rewards of Cloud Computing.