Since the beginning of the economic downturn, many CIOs have been looking at transforming their IT infrastructure as the most efficient means of driving cost savings. Cloud computing has evolved alongside the downturn at an incredibly fast pace, and it has proved to be a popular outsourcing avenue for SMBs to take, avoiding the consumption of critical internal resources. Cloud, SaaS and utility computing models mean organisations can rid themselves of their IT assets without having to acquire any expensive and burdensome hardware.

The complex mix of computing infrastructure created when adopting cloud means organisations have significant overheads in managing infrastructures and are likely to suffer serious technical issues if they fail to manage it properly. Recent cloud management research revealed that two thirds of enterprises are not adopting cloud computing because the infrastructure management is too complex.

Without doubt cloud computing is the future for both SMB and enterprise businesses however, there are still many barriers to adoption. To overcome this, businesses should deploy self-healing, self-learning cloud management systems to effectively control multiple infrastructures, including private, public or hybrid cloud with less down time and improved service levels. The correct automation tool will also allow IT teams to automatically set a range of resource thresholds, enabling easy and controlled use of the cloud. Problem identification, balancing server loads and network management and reporting are prime candidates for automation.

Once businesses wake up to the fact that up to 90% of low level IT support functions can be removed from human hands, maybe outsourcing to the cloud will be as popular amongst larger enterprises as it is amongst SMBs.