IT spending has come under much greater scrutiny in recent years. This attention is not just due to global economic conditions, but a greater awareness within business sponsors of the value and efficiency of IT operations.  It is this awareness that has led to the on-demand model for IT expenditure becoming the expense model of choice for IT investment. This shift toward paying for what is used, when it is used has in turn given rise to cloud-based and virtualized computing models for almost all types of IT service.

For most large organizations cloud-computing will be implemented using a combination of private clouds, where existing Datacenters evolve to support a more dynamic infrastructure and charging model, supplemented by certain facilities drawn from public clouds. This shift away from traditional ways of procuring, implementing, managing and decommissioning IT Assets and services requires a totally different approach to IT Management.

Cloud-based computing models offer many benefits way beyond on-demand pricing to both consumers and suppliers. Chief among those benefits is the opportunity to harness innovation more rapidly and make that innovation available to consumers at a fraction of the cost of traditional models.