As I've noted a number of times, cloud computing promises both greater IT agility and reduced costs. No one disputes the agility issue. Compared to traditional resource deployment that can drag on for weeks or months, cloud computing offers the enormous improvement of a timetable measured in minutes.

1. ERP may be linked with complexity, high cost and 18-month rollouts, but enterprises today have many alternatives to behemoths SAP and Oracle. On-demand and software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors offer robust ERP product sets, and open-source apps can be bought via Amazon.com's EC2 platform. Ray Wang, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research, says users have turned to SaaS for innovative functionality, as well as lower costs.