I was prompted by a headline today for the for the "Cloud Leadership Forum 2011", coming to Santa Clara June 20-21, that stated "Is cloud the end of IT as you know it?" This provocative statement (surely intended to be that way) was taken by a well meaning colleague as a factual trend. Once again, there was a belief that the maintenance and investment costs of IT could be magically eliminated by "whatever this Cloud stuff is". Cloud computing, like most technology terms, has come to have many meanings. Wikipedia defines "Cloud Computing" as referring to the provision of computational resources on demand via a network. Cloud computing can be compared to the supply of electricity and gas, or the provision of telephone, television and postal services. All of these services are presented to the users in a simple way that is easy to understand without the users needing to know how the services are provided. This simplified view is called an abstraction. Similarly, cloud computing offers computer application developers and users an abstract view of services that simplifies and ignores much of the details and inner workings. A provider's offering of abstracted Internet services is often called "The Cloud".

The term has come to apply to both distributed application services, often virtualized, on both private networks and public networks (Internet). The term has subsumed SaaS (Software as a Service), Virtualization, Distributed Computing, and a whole lot of other IT buzz-words.  Ultimately IT fads come and go. Companies have spent fortunes outsourcing their entire IT infrastructure to external service providers and then bringing it all back in-house again OR vice versa. The same can be said with off-shoring of labor and many other IT trends. It is always in the vested interest of the marketeers to play to whatever the current trend happens to be to sell technology and services to executives seeking alternatives.

The reality is that IT, to effectively meet the needs of the business it supports, will always need to be a balance between a number of opposing factors. A balance between investment and maintenance. A balance between in-house and outsourced. A balance between accessibility and security. A balance between local and remote resources. A balance between provisioned services (The Cloud) and dedicated services. Savy executives will recognize that this is true, just as there must be balances between Sales and Manufacturing, Operations and R&D, Operating costs and Capital investment, and so on.  Your CIO should be dialoging with you on a regular bases to adjust the balance of these factor over time to maintain alignment with the strategic and tactical objectives of the organization. Radical fork-lift style changes rarely acheive the results and return people imagine they will.