Cloud computing is clearly worming its way into the enterprise, especially as a testing and development environment and as a platform for less than critical apps and services. But cloud vendors are, in short, still trying to grow up and become a platform for business-critical applications. They're already working on standards and security issues, improving service level agreements and encouraging vendors to embrace the meter of pricing based on software use -- not per-seat cost.

It seems that IT leaders are warming up to cloud computing, with its promise of elasticity, utility-based billing, multiple storage locations, and the ability to pull data directly from storage devices. In fact, cloud computing ranked second (behind virtualization) as the technology most beta-tested in 2009, according to Computerworld's 2010 Forecast survey of more than 300 IT executives.