Can IT manage the cloud? These CTOs can

Brian Corrigan used to run datacenters for major casinos, so he knows not to gamble with mission-critical apps. Now, he works in the other gaming industry -- the one with joysticks and lots of shooting -- building communities for online gamers and collecting information about game usage for their publishers. As CTO at Agora Games, he needs to quickly ramp up and then cut his computing capabilities as new games come on the market, become all the rage, and eventually fade into so-so status. So it's little surprise that he's joined the growing ranks of companies buying computing, storage, and networking power as they need it from the cloud.

What is more surprising is that Corrigan and a number of other IT managers say that the use of virtualization and open source monitoring tools lets them do just as good a job, if not better, monitoring and managing virtual machines in the cloud as equipment in-house or in a collocation facility. That's especially true for those strapped for the time, money, or skills to analyze every last picosecond of application performance.

[ IT pros can use the cloud for their own needs, as Mel Beckman reports. | Confused by cloud hype? InfoWorld shows what cloud computing really means and compares the main cloud offerings. ]

Cloud vendors tell IT: Trust but verify
Not all compute clouds are created equal, and whether cloud computing gives you enough visibility and control for datacenter adoption depends very much on what type of cloud computing you're buying.

Perhaps the most familiar cloud model is software as a service (SaaS), which lets customers use application software over the Web. Examples include, most notably, Salesforce.com in the CRM space and Google Apps for e-mail and calendaring. Here, the customer typically buys from the cloud specifically to get away from systems management chores and often trusts the vendor's performance dashboards and the absence of screaming from users to tell them the application is running.

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