A handy guide to cloud service measurement

Not the land of milk and honey then?

Good article - people need to start looking at the cloud as a technical thingie rather than a marketing strategy with a fluffy name.

Here's my 2d worth.

The provision of agility may be the theory but in practice you will get the same sort of agility that telco customers get - a limited range of options dressed up as a wide range of choice.

What are you going to do when your host decides that the niche application you have found so useful is no longer part of their offer? Your are going to have to formally manage some sort of change.

What are you going to do when your host changes its Ts & Cs in a way which has ramifications for you in respect of local data protection regulations or other legal obligations? The cost of that may be unquantifiable.

And before anyone says that hosts will have to be able to respond adequately to circa 90% of demand to bring their services to market please bear in mind that is not how the big IT players have ever behaved nor does their product lend itself to that model - standardisation is the big issue in IT networks and its going to be even bigger in the cloud - tailor made provision will be phenomenally expensive and standardisation will narrow the field where the big boys want to play - MS, Google, Amazon and Apple didn't get where they are today by believing in some long-tail claptrap.

Having said that - SMEs are already finding it a hard game to keep up with the ever changing IT landscape - the cloud may well offer small businesses a way of addressing that - as ever they will need to employ people who can research and understand the environment, are committed to the company and with the ability to distinguish between sales patter and reality.