Simply-put, many of today�s large businesses have already squeezed much of the obvious cost out of their IT departments by having their lower-end support and development needs replaced or supplemented with offshore-based services, while offloading the costly burden of clunky, unnecessary IT hardware to third party IT infrastructure service providers.

For many large business that have maximized their cost-savings potential with outsourcing, Cloud computing gives CEOs hope that another inflection point is upon us, that will not only take out that next 20-30% of cost, but also empower their business functions to access best-in-class services. The potential to slim down the IT department to a �CIO and a crack team of IT service managers� is becoming very real for the sourcing-savvy organization. However, the challenge for the large organization to move to the Cloud is far more cumbersome than most smaller business, which we discussed so vibrantly here.

Unfortunately, for many of the large businesses using complex ERP apps that are wrenched into all sorts of back-end databases, they are faced with some significant capital investments to find their way to a Cloud-ready environment. And it simply doesn�t suit many of the Cloud-unfriendly software providers to have their clients move to a model that will save them money. The onus is moving to the service providers to build services that can take organizations on a journey of business change and technology change, which we discuss further here.

Our study shows the momentum towards the Cloud is well under way

Firstly, both IT and Business leaders already plan to devote a significant portion of their IT budgets to investing in Cloud. While business executives are understandably bullish, it�s significant that a third of IT executives already see at least 10-20% of their budgets going into Cloud services in the medium-term: