This week, Dr. John Loonsk and I had the pleasure of speaking at the Government Health IT conference during a session called "Clearing the Air on Cloud: Beyond the Hype and Puns."

We had the opportunity to discuss the "nuts and bolts" of federal cloud computing—the deployment and service models, the benefits, the push to cloud service adoption, cloud security considerations and case studies, such as CGI's Healthcare Quality Compare, a cloud-created web- and mobile-based application that won the Health 2.0 online developer challenge.

To promote Health 2.0, cloud adoption makes a lot of sense: rapid development, dependability, scalability, cost and ease of use. For example, I brought up the EPA's emergency response to the Japan earthquake and tsunami, whereby they announced that the public could view, in real time, the scientific radiation metrics through its RadNet system. Within a period of 24 hours (plan to implementation), EPA scaled its website with VM/cloud technologies to handle the anticipated influx of visitors—which went from about 30 visitors a month to, at peak, 30,000 visitors a day.

While all of this sounds great, of course, I remarked that IT managers still need a strategy to avoid disappointment. Government Health IT covered my remarks in their article, "The 3 Ds of cloud computing":

• Dazzle—cloud offerings tend to excite IT and health professionals
• Deploy—next, organizations buy cloud services
• Disappointment—the inevitable realization that the cloud computing model, by itself, is not the answer to all their challenges

What the article didn't detail was my advice on how to avoid this disappointment. The answer is good service management. You can get to the cloud's promise with the same sound principles that have always been part of quality IT management—those that CGI has helped our clients put into practice for 35 years. When moving to the cloud, the service levels and governance framework you expect from other managed services agreements need to be in place. What is nice about the cloud is that from the right provider these are automated and embedded into the cloud service so they are almost effortless to follow.

In the end, the cloud's value can be achieved and sustained through sound service management, which will maximize savings, security, flexibility, transparency, data-driven decision making and collaboration.