While I find these results interesting, in my expreience in working with large IT organizations, these reults are not entirely suprising to me. What I have found is that we are still in the Gartner Hype cycle "Peak of Inflated Expectations" stage of cloud and many people simply don't understand what cloud really is, what is possible, and the realities of actually trying to execute on the proposed vision. It will be interesting to retake this survey as we fall into the "Trough of Disillusionment" stage. I believe, at the end of the day, Cloud will ultimately be the deployment method of choice, but there is still a lot of runway left. my 2 cents...

There still seems to be no significant discussion of the risk management aspects of tying your enterprise infrastructure and applications to one or more external companies. It seems to me that the logical extrapolation of cloud computing would be that we rely on a small number of large cloud operators for all of our services. What happens when that group of companies hits the inevitable wall of the next greatest technology and they start to fail as businesses. At some point we will have built our collective dependence on these companies to the point where we can't allow them to fail due to the effect that would on all businesses. Unwinding that situation would take a long time and a lot of money.

First of all, I agree with both Jims' comments about the study. I would be very interested (not enough to pay $2000) to find out more about how the survey was taken, and how some of the questions were even worded. Did Forrester give the survey takers a set of crisp definitions for the various aspects of the Cloud? If takers were left to use their own perceptions of the Cloud, then I completely question the survey's value. Internal, External, Private, Public, Hybrid; Xaas, where X=S/I/P/'STG'/'DB'/?/; ask 10 people and you will get 10 different answers.

The "Ultimate Vision" for Cloud Computing is very compelling. My ulimate vision is that any consumer or employee (users) will "plug-in" from anywhere to THE network (public internet, private internet or intranet) with some form of thin client (most likely browser-based), access their data and/or application (at any scale required), then get billed for it. Although analogous to electricity/power grids, it is far more complicated because it is global and has multiple components (processing, storage, etc.). In a survey, I would definitely express my interest in buying this, just not NOW because the details are not yet defined.

I also believe that alot of the current hype on Cloud Computing is caused by the obvious financial and support benefits perceived to be part of The Cloud, AND we are in a horrific economy that could use some help. IT pros are getting pressure from financial and business execs to "get them those benefits...now!". As Jim Prevo mentioned, they are not yet looking carefully at the Risk exposure, partially because the vendors are claiming (without detailed explanation) it is safer than your internal IS. Tell that to the companies using RackSpace and Google during the recent outages, or the clients that were all but put out of business when the FBI raided their vendor's Dallas data center in March and confiscated the equipment they were running on. What about the recent closures of two vendors?

The debate over Cloud Computing will go on for years. Hopefully, we (the IT industry) will get our act together, cut out the hype, and gradually fulfill the ultimate vision. For me, I am excited. I am an infrastructure expert, and all of these "Cloud" startups need my expertise. :-)

Interesting points, but it is important to note that while the Forrester report was published at the end of May 2009, and this CIO article appeared at the end of June - the actual survey data for the report was collected in the 3rd quarter of 2008. Also, the demographics of the survey do not match the demographics (and spend patterns) of the overall IT industry.