As the cost and convenience benefits of cloud computing become more compelling, more and more IT departments are taking a close look at moving large parts of their infrastructure out of their data centers.
While a year or two ago it was possible to dismiss many of the cloud offerings as too new and somewhat rickety, that objection no longer applies. For the industry-leading cloud vendors, the growing pains are essentially over and the services for storage, computing, load balancing and other functions are as good or better than what most IT departments are getting out of their data centers and are offered at extremely attractive prices.