blandry (8/4/2011)
"The cloud isn't the ultimate answer, and you ought to have a backup plan, which should include the ability to move your services back to your own data center."This is a strange and rather unrealistic statement. If a company moves to the cloud, they are (99.99% of the time) sold on the cloud from an economic standpoint. So what IT Director is going to invest in Cloud computing AND have to maintain a Data Center 'just in case'. Try pushing that one past a CEO and you will either be laughed out of the office, or worse, fired for being slightly braindead as you double or triple IT costs.
I'm not sure that's true. Over time, perhaps, but most of the people moving to the cloud, including MS, are doing so an application at a time. So they still have some local resources. They may even always have some local resources for things like development.
There also are applications that people move to the cloud because of a "burst" of demand that may tail off and they decide to bring it back in house.