A new survey suggests that as cloud moves into the mainstream of business, it brings new sources of anxiety as well. This disruption and the dramatic shift in cloud computing intentions over the past few years is revealed in a report by Saugatuck Technology.

"Buying and deployment patterns have shifted rapidly toward a near full embrace of the cloud, from the more tactical and point solution-focused initiatives not long ago," writes Bill McNee, author of the report.

Saugatuck Technology conducted in-depth interviews with CIOs and CTOs at 12 large organizations. The CIOs and CTOs see themselves as now entering a "crisis of opportunity" and innovation, McNee wrote in the report. The crisis is about more than just a revolution in service delivery, McNee said. The dilemna is also fueled by the drive toward mobility, advanced analytics and social business. What this calls for is "a new mission for IT, with a new set of roles, responsibilities and skills required for success."

IT Needs to Take Control of the Cloud Before a Storm Ensues
IT organizations must step up now and change its approach to cloud services, according to a study, "Delivering on High Cloud Expectations," commissioned by BMC Software and conducted by Forrester Research.

This includes building trust with the lines of business, beginning to manage public cloud services, and pursuing increased automation for service provisioning and operations, according to ZDNet.

"Cloud and software as a service (SaaS) are in enterprises in a big way," says Brian Singer, lead solutions marketing manager for BMC. "And we wanted to see how IT was dealing with them."

For the study, researchers polled 327 enterprise infrastructure executives and architects in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Among the key findings:

• Today, 58 percent run mission-critical workloads in unmanaged public clouds, regardless of policy. The researchers use "unmanaged" to describe clouds that are managed by the cloud operators, but not by the company buying the service.
• In the next two years, 79 percent plan to run mission-critical workloads on unmanaged cloud services.
• Nearly three out of four responders, 71 percent, thought that IT should be responsible for public cloud services.
• Seventy two percent of CIOs believe that the business sees cloud computing as a way to circumvent IT.

Cloud Computing Industry Plans to Police Its Own
Cloud services organizations and companies whose daily bread is earned through trusted relationships with their clients have decided to band together and create a set of guidelines for the rest, according to Technorati.

The New Zealand Computer Society has put together a basic code of conduct for companies providing Web-based computing services, calling it CloudCode.

According to Joy Cottle, CloudCode facilitator, "The CloudCode is proactive, not prescriptive, based on what the industry is asking for both from a consumer and supplier perspective and more importantly a code of practice that is easily adopted by the providers and easily understood by the consumer."

"A lack of understanding of the accepted definitions of cloud computing and what it entails, results in a situation where services are being offered that don't meet what are generally considered acceptable standards of practice," said the Society.