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Cloud Computing shopping list: 4 key ingredients

Facing strong concerns about control and security, the cloud-computing trend has drifted somewhat-- away from the notion that all computing resources can be had from outside, and toward a vision of a data center magically transformed for easy connections to internal and external IT resources.

Sales of cloud-related technology are growing at 26 percent per year--six times the rate of IT spending overall, though they made up only about 5 percent of total IT revenue this year, according to IDC's Cloud Services Overview report. Defining what constitutes cloud-related spending is difficult, the report acknowledges, though it estimates global spending of $17.5 billion on cloud technologies in 2009 will grow to $44.2 billion by 2013.

Hybrid or internal clouds will be the rule, however; even in 2013, only about 10 percent of that spending will go specifically to public clouds, IDC predicts.

Hybrid cloud infrastructure isn't radically different from existing data-center best practices, except that all the pieces are supposed to fit neatly together using Internet-age interoperability standards rather than homegrown kludge, according to according to Chris Wolf, analyst at The Burton Group.

As you prepare spending plans that line up with a move to the cloud, consider these four items as key for your list.

1. Application Integration
Surprise: Software integration isn't the first thing most companies think about when building a cloud, but it's the most important one, according to Bernard Golden, CEO at cloud consulting firm HyperStratus, and CIO.com blogger.

Integration means more than just batch-processing chunks of data being traded between applications once or twice per day the way that was done on mainframes, according to Tom Fisher, vice president of cloud computing at SuccessFactors.com, a business-application SaaS provider in San Mateo, Calif.

Being able to provision and manage user identities from a single location across a range of applications is critical, especially for companies that have never been in the software-providing business before and don't view their IT as a primary product, he says.

"What you're looking for is take your schema and map it to PeopleSoft or another application so you can get more functional integration," Fisher says. "You're passing messages back and forth to each other with proper error-handling agreement so you can be more responsive. It's still not real time integration, but in most cases you don't really need that."