Discussion on:

Leveraging the cloud for IT innovation

"agility because innovation is an iterative process, that requires many tries and failures in order to get right." That statement is a product of an industry that does not listen to it's customer base. An accountant could care less about how you deliver his charter of accounts report but rather that it is accurate and repeatable. This "agility" world is the creation of a class of pseudo IT want to be's created by the ease of HTML, Java and other front end apps that lack the traditional processes of a true IT professional.

Your article assumes the IT shop is simple enough that environments are easily duplicated. It also assumes no internal virtualization is in place. With large integrated OSS systems moving to the public cloud fails to help. If you have an internal platform that can spin up servers quickly, your agility argument fails again. There is a size and maturity level of an IT group where cloud offerings makes sense but it is not for everybody.