See how CIOs Uncover Cloud-computing mysteries and find new outlets for CEOs

What kind of cloud computing are we doing? What Cloud strategies do you use? Corporate boards, CEOs, and even business leaders all raise these questions to CIOs in cloud computing.

How are CIOs going to uncover the mysteries of cloud computing for corporate leaders? The following discussion of cloud computing should be able to answer these questions.

1. "Cloud computing" is largely discredited

Now many companies think that their development in cloud computing is always behind others, that the world is at the forefront of cloud computing. But the combination of the following figures shows that most so-called "cloud computing" is not a real cloud. Dr Dobbs and Forrester have surveyed 1021 developers, and the results show that only about 4% per cent of the companies currently deployed application cloud computing. The Information weekly Outlook 2010 survey results show that 10% of companies are doing so-called "cloud computing" (ie, CPU online, storage, but not including SaaS), while another 5% of the company said that in the future will certainly be put into the cloud. These survey data clearly illustrate to us the fact that cloud computing is the essence of access to services from Third-party vendors, and that it only pays for the services it uses and is not widely accepted for the time being.

But that does not mean that we should leave it behind because it would be a very serious mistake. Paying too much attention to cloud computing is not because we CIOs foolishly swallowed the hype of the media, but the potentially immeasurable benefits behind the rapid development of cloud computing technology. A year ago, only 31% of Newsweek's readers were positive about the development of cloud computing, investing in, planning cloud computing, or taking into account the economic downturn, only "it is possible" to use it. But this year, that number has risen to 46%. 15% means cloud computing has taken a big step in the year. Even though most users are only interested in cloud computing today, their momentum has given the public full confidence.

2. Research is more important than deployment

In the 2002, because of the pursuit of cost savings, we hastily developed a vital overseas E-commerce project, and the result shows that it is very wrong to focus on immediate interests only. As the project is not mature enough, the project is completely unable to meet our needs. This painful lesson has taught us how to understand risk and effectively manage the experience of overseas assets, and to learn more about the nature of cloud computing.

At this year's Information weekly 500 conference, I heard an interesting analogy: the outsourcing of infrastructure is like renting a house, and cloud computing is a hotel room. You don't have to pay attention to other companies--whether they're co-operative or irrelevant--you just hire what you need. We need to understand and accept the risks and the nature of this new form of outsourcing.

3, we continue to explore the research

We're not sitting there waiting for someone else to perfect the cloud. Project pilot projects, some discrete work, intensive computing to the cloud provider to do, to the IT team to provide learning experience, we hope that this series of work can help business leaders to make better decisions. We've been studying these cloud providers, such as Amazon's Web services and Microsoft's recently launched Azure Service, to try to tap into the potential of their cloud computing services. We also discuss with many vendors the case process they encounter about cloud computing variables. For example, the American Lilly Company uses Amazon's EC2 service for scientific collaboration and computing.

At the same time, we also use the concept of cloud structure, in the data center to build a demand and shared data resource platform. While this effort saves costs in the short term, we hope that a composite cloud computing platform, such as Amazon, can simplify work and improve efficiency, and that using some basic work can produce the results of a lot of previous tedious work.