Cloud computing is a scary word in some conservative enterprises, but it doesn't have to be. Here are some proven ideas on how the conservative enterprise can dip their toe in the water today, get comfortable with the cloud and save some real cash.

First, a quick, 30-second primer on cloud computing for those who aren't familiar. Commoditized hardware solutions now are offered in the form of cloud computing infrastructure services. Many vendors, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM are starting to build massively scalable data centers (think power plants), and are offering up their computing resources in a utility pricing or “pay by the drink” model. This means that instead of companies having to pay for an entire server and all of the business continuity, disaster recovery and administration equipment/fees that come with it, they can choose to pay by the GB of storage used per month or pay by the CPU power they consume. In other words, you can pay for infrastructure services the same way you pay for water or electricity, with all of the BC, DR, licensing and support costs baked in. This is an incredibly compelling pricing structure that takes advantage of the concept of economies of scale, and it has begun to get huge traction.

The birth of these services is relatively recent, and there still are a lot of questions around security, SLAs (99.9 percent uptime is the current standard) and privacy, all of which are being handled in slightly different ways by the different vendors. There’s going to be standardization (and perhaps ultimately, regulation) in these areas as the technologies mature, but regardless, there are ways to take advantage of these services in the short term, without introducing risk into your organization.

Opportunity 1: Cloud Test Environments

Test environments are often costly. Conservative enterprises often try to mimic production configurations in their test environments. They also have multiple test environments to isolate different phases of the testing lifecycle (i.e., system, integration, performance, etc.). The cloud is a great place to host test environments while handing off the administration duties to the application teams.

An infrastructure organization can provide a pre-configured image/virtual machine of an application's test environment to the development staff for deployment to the cloud. The app teams then have the flexibility of spinning up as many test environments as they need, and they only pay for the uptime of the server. So if you only need the test environment available for four hours on a Friday, you're only paying for those four hours! It also allows for an easier way to tie back infrastructure costs to individual applications, to allow for more granular budgeting for infrastructure services.

Opportunity 2: Geographically Distributed Storage/Disaster Recovery

Many conservative enterprises pay an arm and a leg for offsite storage for disaster recovery purposes. This offsite data isn't often used as a part of day-to-day processing; it exists for DR purposes. The cloud is a great alternative for offsite storage, with commoditized pricing of .10/GB/month. Several utilities allow you to store data encrypted on the cloud as well.

The cloud also provides a great alternative for sharing files geographically. Many of the large cloud infrastructure providers allow you to park your files on different continents. So if your European offices complain of slow access to data, you can have a mirrored drive or database on the cloud that they can access locally, while your "source of truth" is safe within your own data centers in the States.

Opportunity 3: Tier 2/3 or Departmental Applications

The third opportunity is leveraging the utility pricing of cloud hosting for tier 2 or 3 departmental applications. If you have non-mission critical apps with non-mission critical data, those are great candidates to migrate to the cloud. Since most major platforms are supported on the cloud today (Windows 2003, OpenSolaris, Multiple Linux Distros), many custom and packaged apps can be hosted on the cloud. This is another way for enterprises to dip their toe in the water while keeping their mission-critical applications safe at home.

Opportunity 4: Commoditized Enterprise SaaS

Many packaged enterprise applications are moving to hosted SaaS subscription-based pricing models. Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Exchange are two examples of commoditized applications (i.e., non-business differentiators) that companies can outsource. The licensing models are competitive, but arguably a total cost of ownership analysis should be done, since the size of the organization can often dictate the degree of savings.

These are a few examples of how conservative enterprises can start leveraging the cloud for real cost savings today. What are your thoughts? Are these really low-risk alternatives? Are there other ways companies can use the cloud to save cash without "handing over the keys"? Does it make sense for enterprises to start dipping their toes in the water at this point?