Half of organisations have said that what excites them most about the cloud aside from the acknowledged business benefits of cost saving and increased agility is that resources can be reassigned to focus more on creativity and growth rather than fire drills according to a poll by 360°IT - The IT Infrastructure Event, due to take place at London's Earls Court this coming September.

A further 30% said that it was the ability to use familiar apps they used outside work in a work environment, and 14% thought that they would gain competitive advantage over non cloud adopters. Only 9% were too worried about security risks to get excited by the cloud. [Poll of 509 IT managers carried out in June 2010]

Peter Hinssen A leading lecturer and technology trends expert who blogs for 360°IT says that, far from being wary of cloud computing, businesses should actively embrace its benefits and accelerate the rate of adoption that the Internet-based computing and storage environment brings to firms of all sizes.

Hinssen says, "It is just a way of saying we are going to be increasingly thinking in terms of the network, and will be much less inclined to run all sorts of hardware and software locally ourselves."

"Of course, we have been moving steadily in that direction for years. Just look at telephony: we all used to have an answering machine at home for our landline, but now we just use our mobile voicemail `in the cloud'," he added.

According to Hinssen, who is a lecturer at the London Business School, many of us still have a certain nostalgic desire to hold on to a real device, as well as a need to be able to see our own data centre run with our own server and our own software.

If cloud evolution continues, he says, then a data centre is soon likely to become a collector's item. Many IT people today, he explains, find that hard to cope with.

"After all, we have grown up with the smell of computer hardware and we want to keep it as close to us as possible," he said, adding that the next generation of users sees things differently.

"Consider email. Generation Y finds it much more convenient to use Google's Gmail than their company email, and prefers the ease of MSN and Facebook to internal company systems for communicating with one another. Even storing and exchanging documents is a lot easier for them with Google Docs than using the company intranet," he explained.