There was a great article in the Economist that I caught by way of InformationWeek that largely reinforced the ideas that I put forward earlier in my posts about the switch from IT CapEx to IT OpEx and the rise of SaaS and Cloud Computing, primarily pointing out that IT data center environments today are costly to maintain and frequently underused:

The way in which their IT infrastructure has grown is proving unsustainable. Most corporate data centres today are complex warrens of underused hardware that require more and more people, space and power to keep them going. The current economic malaise will increase the pressure on companies to become more efficient. More has to be done with less, which is cloud computing’s main promise.

Certainly doing “more with less” is key, but also important is being able to make more predictable and easy to forecast budgets, and make sensible trade-off calls when it comes to rolling out new applications.

Even without switching to true SaaS providers, software developers and consumers alike can look to Cloud Computing solutions, such as Amazon’s EC2 computing platform or Google’s App Engine.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, SaaS