Reducing operational costs and accelerating the delivery of new business functions are ever-present themes of IT organizations. Over the past three years, many enterprises and governments have been evaluating how the cloud can address these familiar themes. A number of them have used public clouds or a service provider’s virtual private cloud to perform “proof of concepts” or to run development and test environments. This provides a risk-free way of determining if the cloud delivery model will provide the desired benefits and if their organization is ready to embrace it. More...