“Cloud” is a much-used IT industry term that means different things to different people. Does it mean Web-based applications? Web-hosted services? Centralized server farms and data centers? Platforms for developing and running scalable applications?

The cloud is about providing services—Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS). Another way to look at it: The cloud is about providing a pool of computing resources that all operate together, effectively as a single computer. The cloud has been called the next logical step in enterprise computing. No longer as much about managing infrastructure, enterprise computing is now more about managing information. It’s about having your storage, your application development environment, your applications, and your security available to you when you need them—all from an information technology grid.

Why consider moving to a cloud model? Why now?

Greater business agility. A cloud model gives you the ability to respond to business demands more effectively and helps ensure employees have on-demand access to critical business information, customers, partners, and each other, using nearly any device, from virtually anywhere. The result: They can give priority to the most critical business tasks first. Greater resource agility. The management burden of anticipating and building out excess capacity IT infrastructure decreases. The result—less management, maintenance, and deployment time, with the additional benefit of greater scalability to more easily handle peaks in demand. Managed costs. From a financial perspective, you can manage costs as a capital expense or an operational expense depending on what works best for your business. Smaller carbon footprint. At the same time, using off-premises IT infrastructure has the additional value of decreasing your environmental impact through a reduction in the physical resources required to run on-premises systems. But are there risks in cloud computing? What does it mean to your role as an IT leader in your organization? Does it mean giving up control? Well managed Cloud Services answer all of these questions.