Businesses always seek to remove fixed costs and move to variable costs across the enterprise. This is the promise for IT offered by Cloud Computing which offers to reduce the capital intensive process of delivering new projects (as well as reducing time to market).

Diagram showing the difference between traditional funding for IT projects and that promised by Cloud Computing

If this ideal can be achieved then there will be a number of impacts on IT project delivery:

• The capital requirements from new IT projects will reduce as the model will move to a Pay as You Go platform
• Reduced impact from project failure or curtailment as capital will not need to be written off - the service can effectively be turned off
• Projects will become scalable as the relationship between demand and cost will be linear

The Cloud applications market is still in its infancy but the platform is maturing rapidly and will bring about disruptive change to the traditional hardware/software supply market for organisations.