Very few people in IT know the term Cloud Computing. But I think everyone who works in a contemporary IT department will understand it. Outsourcing is the main driver, and it emerges as a reality with multi-vendor models.
One of the biggest challenges to organizations is their information security. Most organizations are not ready for this, particularly in separating out data from applications. I write about this in my article 'Can You Afford The Cloud?' I think this is more endemic in Europe than it is in the US.

Good basis article about the concepts of the cloud and the business drivers about why this concept is interesting and important. However, I believe that this cloud computing is an advanced topic in a world of IT shops that have failed to even achieve the basics of IT management. Most have to learn to walk upright before considering how to run with cloud computing. Many IT shops remain in denial about their own maturity.

For those who can run, I hope that the next interesting chapter will be "How is Cloud Computing implemented". From what I see, there are a number of converging technology concepts that are (or will be) key to this. Certainly the easy route for many companies will be to outsource the application management and the hosting of equipment to others. This would force the adoption of best computing practices by the business to buy only what they need, pay for the appropriate level of service, and adopt other good practices for development, testing and deployment of new or revised services.

I believe that this article suggests that those mastering cloud computing will need to be the masters of their own operations for: Asset Management, Availability, Capacity, Security, Configuration, Release Management, Service Level Mgt. and others. Wow, those are some of the services that are key enablers of an IT Infrastructure Library or ITIL(R) framework! From my experience, an IT shop cannot even think about advanced computing topics like cloud computing without mastering the common sense concepts of ITIL first.

All that said, it is certainly not impossible for a well run enterprise to do it internally, rather than relying solely on outsourcing to jump start the process. To my previous point, if an IT shop has structured themselves on an ITIL framework, the concepts needed for cloud computing become much easier to embrace. Additional computing capacity (servers, storage, network) can be economically justified, automated provisioning can be enabled (yes, there are tools to do this!), and even the maturity to cannibalize low priority systems for high priority needs yields a productive discussion and decision between the business and IT. A win-win scenario.

I vote yes for cloud computing, but only for those mature enough to embrace it.