An Evening in the Cloud

I sat in on the "An Evening in the Cloud" discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and was very pleased. They had a great panel and there was a good discussion which was was filmed and there is a good in depth summary on the Enterprise2 Blog.

It started out with a great premise that made everyone stand up and take notice. The premise was "We should move ALL of our Enterprise IT resources into the Cloud" , and the discussion was between the three big Cloud vendors Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com and a group of CXO type executives.

I heard each vendor talking about the positive benefits for using their solutions but each vendor stopped short of recommending that we move ALL Enterprise IT Resources into the Cloud.  This is not a new opinion, in fact it is an option shared by many in the IT community.

Overall, I agree with this opinion. What I struggle with is the term "Cloud Computing" because it has received so much hype, and every new solution on the Internet is now referred to as Cloud Computing, much the same way that Web 2.0 grew in popularity.

As time goes on we will learn more and more about Cloud Computing and the subtle differences will emerge, for now, if you have an interest in cloud computing, you should start by identifying your needs and make sure that your Cloud vendor of choice can meet your requirements.