Herbjorn just posted this nice blog on the top 3 showstoppers of cloud computing – and an unexpected one.

Agree!

Now – there are additional ways of gaining trust – testing the water via carrying out cloud platform evaluations; doing a proof of concept of deploying a slice of an existing business application, and see what you learn in dimensions around performance, security, licensing, maintainability etc ; gaining better control in terms of forecasting how much cloud resource you will need, and how much it will cost; and of course, as Herbjorn mentioned, rigorous contractual conversations with your favourite cloud vendor.

I would also expand on the ‘challenge of CapEx – to – OpEx’, to also include enterprise organisations that already has multi-year outsourcing arrangements… the adoption of cloud represents a radical shift in an enterprise’s IT process, particularly in the management, governance and service delivery aspects, not to mention the expected changes in people’s roles and responsibility. 

The big prize will go to the innovative System Integrators that work out a way to continual provide enterprise strength IT services, while incorporating effective and efficient wrapper support services over some attractive public IaaS offerings…