Sounds like the start of a bad Christmas cracker joke.  Talking of Christmas, I’ve already had the first ‘Festive discount’ email from a supplier.  I thought there was an unwritten rule that we had to get through Halloween and Fireworks night before they started promoting Christmas.

Cloud Computing seems to have struck a chord a way that ASP, OnDemand, SaaS and all the previous incarnations never have. Every analyst is blogging and tweeting about it, there are multiple conferences, there are books that have been written   - in fact I’ve co-authored 2 Thinking of.. books on the Cloud. One aimed at buyers and the other for software vendors looking to migrate.

But what is interesting is that it has reached the mainstream press – hence the joke.  It is no longer something that IT folks talk about in terms that baffle the rest of society. Now most business people have heard of ‘the Cloud’ even if they don’t understand it, and more critically the implications.

So business people are embracing the ideas of Cloud Computing. Why? Because they can see immediate value from the applications and services being offered.  But there are ‘unknown unknowns’  There are corporate, security and reputation risks that they don’t even know that the consider. That is the role of the CIO to coach, mentor and support the business as they look at the Cloud.

So do CIOs need a ‘make over’?  Certainly in the eyes of most of the business.

But unfortunately the Cloud has driven an even greater rift between business and IT.  It is being used to show how smaller nimbler suppliers are delivering far faster than the internal IT department. But there is a good reason.  The IT department is spending 80% of its time and effort ‘keeping the lights on’ and the remaining 20% on providing new solution that are robust, scalable, secure and integrated into the core applications. How many of the ‘new’ Cloud providers are truly enterprise ready?

Which is we wrote Thinking of.. Buying a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions. It has many, if not most, of the questions that you should be asking of yourself and your Cloud supplier.

A man goes into a shop and says “I’d like to buy a Cloud Computer”  So rather than buying a Cloud Computer, maybe he needs a copy of our book?  What a great idea for a Christmas present for CIOs for all their business managers.