I read CIO magazine online daily. All-though I do not agree with their opinions most of the time (because they are too heavily driven by Gartner), I do agree with this article as it pertains to the SMB market.

It seems as if every CIO comes back from a conference cocktail party demanding IT “move to the cloud.” While this can mean many things; i.e. using software-as-a-service (SaaS), managed hosting, or application service providers (ASP), the demand often centers on moving applications out of your own budget-sucking data center and up to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform.

It seems as if every CIO comes back from a conference cocktail party demanding IT “move to the cloud.” While this can mean many things, including using software-as-a-service (SaaS), managed hosting, or application service providers (ASP), the demand often centers on moving applications out of your own budget-sucking data center and up to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform.

Forrester defines cloud computing as:

A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way.

Public IaaS cloud computing is the delivery of compute (virtualized servers, storage, and networking) on demand as a shared service. The promises of IaaS clouds combine real flexibility and instant capacity with compelling economics like $0.10 per CPU per hour. While the economics are true, they are a tease.

The value of IaaS clouds lies in developer productivity and time-to-market more than cost, as IaaS clouds let developers entirely control the provisioning, configuration, and deployment of the VM themselves. The key is deploying the right kinds of applications, for the right types of uses, with the right business model behind this practice.

Check out the rest of the article and let me know what you think.

http://www.cio.com/article/505318/3_Keys_to_Using_IaaS_Public_Clouds_Wisely