Why are businesses caring about the Cloud?

Cloud computing is a buzzword these days. Every customer I meet have some pilot project going on that relates to the cloud. Here are some of the drivers for it's adoption that I see from my perspective.

Business Drivers:

1. CFOs love it - The "public cloud and managed private clouds" model removes technology capital expenditure (capex) from the company balance sheets. So, CFOs love the pay-as-you-go monthly subscription model that this brings in.
2. Reduce hardware costs: Even when companies don't want to go the public/managed cloud route yet, by adopting the private clouds, companies want to realize the benefits of eliminating unused computing power.
   
3. Go to market faster - Since, this avoids the long hardware procurement cycles, businesses can bring a solution faster to market.
4. Brings in new ways of interacting with customers - Cloud is bringing in new application programming models that makes it easy for companies to interact with customers using Web 2.0, mobile, widgets, social networking apps - such as Google App Engine, Google apps. A company wants to
   

Technical Drivers:

1. Parallel development: Once the company procures the software license, they want to immediately start prototyping and developing the solution (in the cloud). Once, they get hardware for it, they want to move the solution from the cloud into the datacenter for test/stage and finally taking into production.
2. Scales up and down to meet demand: IT doesn't have to plan for capacity and worry about expenditure on over capacity as cloud offers automatic up and down scaling based on demand.
   
3. Leverage existing functionality provided by hosted solutions: Customers are embedding certain solutions from publicly hosted solutions such as Workday, Salesforce.com into their business processes to reduce the complexity, and get to market faster.
4. Enables self-service: This model gives full control on how you want to manage and use resources available to you.
   

If you have inputs into these drivers or have others drivers that's leading to adoption in your company, pls comment to this blog entry.