If we look at the most common set of Cloud-Based services, from full blown hosted applications to SaaS providers like Salesforce.com and to utility-style infrastructure services like storage or virtual servers, we see that there are a multitude of different services, each with its own use case.

Why go Cloud at all?

Cloud services can give companies what they always need, the ability to add additional capacity or capabilities on the fly without having to spend precious capital on infrastructure, software, and new employees. Especially in the current economy, cash is king and customers want flexible IT that they can pay for as they need it. This can obviously be hugely valuable but in some cases, it might make more sense to either keep the service in house or leverage a dedicated virtualized environment where you will have control over the security, access, backups, etc.

With the dedicated virtualized environment, customers are able to retain control of the virtual environment but avoid the capital expense of buying the hardware/software. It is truly the best of both worlds. I have some customers that want to use the shared virtual environment and some that want the dedicated host or cluster. It really depends on how the customer wants to use the environment and how much control they want to have.

The other nice thing about these on-demand virtual environments is that they allow customers to dip their toe in the water and test the service with a Disaster Recovery, QA, or Development environment and expand on the fly with other services without any capital expenditures. For example, a customer could start out with a test VM, use it as a QA environment, test functionality, access, performance, etc. then decide how to proceed. This can all be done very quickly and inexpensively. It is exactly this kind of flexibility, ease of provisioning, and low cost solution that is driving Cloud Computing and all of the “blank – as a Service” interest and adoption in the marketplace and I don’t see it slowing down any time soon.

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