(Steven Warren, TechRepublic) Unless you’ve been sleeping this past year, you’ve heard about cloud computing. It seems as if many companies are looking at this heavily for the future.[...]The economy today is not in the best shape it has ever been, and companies want to spend less and less money on IT servers and infrastructure. With this in mind, companies are looking to outsource IT and take advantage of the SAAS model to handle any third-party applications that require constant babysitting and upgrades.

So the bean counters do the math and want to outsource the infrastructure to outside companies dedicated to handling the IT backbone. They don’t want to deal with the cooling power costs and the upgrading and maintaining the infrastructure. They want to outsource all of that and just own the data and simply plug it in to an existing cloud infrastructure like we plug a light into a socket. And when we are done, we can either turn off the light or, better yet, pull the plug and find a better socket or vendor. So basically, we can move to any vendor who handles the infrastructure, but we always own the most vital part: the data.