Cloud computing providers have a lot to offer the enterprise - especially insight into how the latest technologies bring business agility. A perfect storm is brewing in the form of cloud computing, with technologies and CIO strategies converging to create a more cost-effective and agile business driven by IT.

Some pundits foresee a future in which all data center computing is done in the "cloud," but that future is a long way off. Most organizations have just begun to venture into the cloud: signing up for Software as a Service (saas) offerings, integrating saas applications, buying additional server capacity from providers such as Amazon.com Inc. with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering. But many others remain skeptical because of security and quality-of-service concerns.

If there's one thing CIOs can start to do now, it's to dissect what cloud providers are doing as a blueprint for how to prep their own environments for web-oriented architectures and next-generation data centers and to understand the risks and governance issues in this new model.

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