Proponents of cloud computing often insist that one of its biggest benefits is not decreased costs, but greater agility. To them, obtaining infrastructure in minutes rather than months is a game-changer. Of course, as I noted in a column last year, viewing lower costs and increased agility as separate cloud characteristics is incorrect; instead, lower costs and greater agility are, so to speak, two sides of the same coin.
Notwithstanding the confusion regarding cost and agility, many people fail to appreciate the point of agility. For them, cloud computing’s agility offers the opportunity to speed up a lengthy process in an application’s lifecycle; however, they leave the rest of their processes undisturbed. The ultimate result is that one group in the overall IT organization is happy – developers – while for everyone else, it’s business as usual.