Cloud Computing is Democratizing Computing Power…

…and Traditional IT Barriers of Cost, Time, Quality, Scale, and Geographic Location. That’s the striking headline of a press release today from Aberdeen Group, announcing a report, “Business Adoption of Cloud Computing: Reduce Cost, Complexity and Energy Consumption.”

Aberdeen Group surveyed 184 organizations including small, medium, and enterprise businesses, and found a landslide of interest and action in cloud computing:

• 77 percent monitor cloud applications for efficiency and use
• 75 percent have a cloud team or task force
• 69 percent use a formal cloud evaluation process
• 62 percent have a formal education plan for training cloud team

The paragraph I like most from the press release is, “cloud computing is changing the role of IT from predominantly one of maintenance to one of innovation enabler through the new service delivery model of cloud services. Consequently, top companies are realizing the critical need to establish a governance model around SOA architectures and cloud-based service delivery.”

If, according to the paragraph, IT is focusing more on innovation and less on maintenance, and implements SOA to securely expose application functionality for new composite applications and other new purposes, wouldn’t that be good for IT professionals, their companies, and their customers?

The survey also revealed that the top business pressures driving the adoption of cloud computing include:

• Overall cost of IT infrastructure
• Need to enhance competitive advantage
• Lack of flexibility in the current IT environment
• Need to support additional services or users

The report also addresses how cloud computing and virtualization help green IT and sustainability.

I look forward to reading the report over the next several days. I hope you do, too. You can obtain a complimentary copy here until November 27, 2009.

“Small businesses and startups are adopting cloud computing to break down traditional technological and financial barriers in the delivery of new categories of software innovation,” said Bill Lesieur, research director, Aberdeen. “Larger businesses are cutting costs with cloud computing while embarking on a transformation of their IT service delivery models based on SOA architectures and cloud computing.”

Is that quote true for your organization?