Domesticating Cloud for enterprise use

For the past couple of years, I’ve been pursuing trends in enterprise computing firstly because it’s my bread, butter and cheese(cheesy stuff..hmm..). Secondly because it’s a trait of primates of all types to follow things that excite them. Frank(synatra)ly speaking, that’s the reason why I started pursuing the cloud computing bandwagon, even before it wasn’t this cloudy and we were calling it utility computing, ASP, SaaS etc. Now that we are all blind men and women trying to understand this mammoth, I was wondering what could be the best fit jobs that we can assign to it so that we can be familiar with the beast, and once it become a more domesticated, predictable, mature and usable one we can confidently ride on it.

Here are few things I feel we(enterprise I.T) can do even today with existing clouds

1. As I mentioned in another post here, testing sure is an area that we can look into, since no production data goes in there.


2. Outward facing shared I.T services – Say B2B connectivity environments etc. One reason they are anyway externally facing, and a cloud hosted system can act as the gateway, plus give you all the benefits of cloud.


3. High computing power required internal systems such as
   
   
   
   • Systems with occasional very high payload, such as reconciliation systems, payroll calculators etc can hire on-demand processing power of cloud rather than investing in ten servers for a ten minute job in ten months?
   
   
   • Desktop applications like word processors etc – Now here there could be issues of data confidentiality etc, but if being found secure enough, these mass consumed applications can be moved to cloud.
   
   
   • E-mail systems – we have some of the most successful e-mail systems in the world on cloud already, I think corporate e-mails can also move there, security sure is a concern, but e-mails are pretty much secure these days, aren’t they?


4. Data archival – Store all your 19th century operational data in cloud data stores.


5. Communication, collaboration apps - if e-mails can, then why not all your other white/black boarding etc moved there as well? Why not even your online meeting stuff?

I'm bored..what else?