Was Up

The story about what every CEO needs to know about the cloud is about a growing environment growing over the years. It also talks about the growing of certain companies such as IBM. One main focus of the article was making individuals more productive in the world today. One thing I do agree is that I think the comment on red herrings is over aggressive point, I think that the point the author wants to get across is that many times people don't realize how much it costs to build the level of security, availability, etc. that providers currently offer and that many times the security offered by providers is higher than that of custom implementations. Also, these services are much more thoroughly tested than almost any others because they have very high volume of users. It comes down to outsourcing this piece to experts and thereby achieving higher guarantees and the benefits of scale. I also think the key is really to evaluate on a case-by-case basis whether a cloud offering is the right solution for a particular problem. Companies that only need non mission critical services, might not find cost savings from cloud offerings because 99.9% availability and the high level of security may not be needed. However, there are many use cases for which cloud offerings are a huge business benefit in terms of cost, speed of rollout, speed of scale-up and scale-down, etc. Another simple example is when one wants to prototype. Someone can make up to $10K capital investment to bring up the servers, etc. required for the experiment or they could pay a recurring $1K/month for a short period until the concept is proven. As Aigars said, cloud offerings enable action without huge up-front expenditures.