The Noughty Outies the relevant term is server hugger

In the Noughty Outies the relevant term is "server hugger," coined by pithy Forrester analyst James Staten as a way to ding executives who resist cloud computing or virtualization because they just don't trust a server they can't see.

Staten and other virtualization- and cloud-computing analysts didn't use pejoratives back at that time to describe IT or business managers who resisted virtualization. Their reasons were too good.

The situation is more complicated than the business-unit manager who thinks IT is gypping his or her department by taking away the physical servers and replacing them with an equivalent amount of processing power, allocated via cloud-based infrastructure, from the data center.

Few, if any companies have as a matter of fact pitchforked out all their hardware in favor of cloud-based apps. None I know of have gone in every way to externally provided applications to run the business.

There are legacy data centers, enterprise apps, networks, storage – all the traditional IT stuff to be managed and handled and integrated and shoved around the data center until you find a cool spot.

The load-balancing

Handing some of the load-balancing and capacity planning off to an outside vendor isn't that big a deal from the point of view of the CFO and CEO. It's just one more way to get the computing done.

To IT people who have always counted their worth according to the systems they run or efficiency of their networks or reliability of their networks, having the physical component of some of those assets disappear can be unnerving.

The things that make them comfortable

Everyone wants to preserve the things that make them comfortable, the things they know they can work with, especially when the alternative is something as half-proven as cloud computing.

lbloom asks Is there on the whole a justification for the added expense of Mac over PCs, and do Macs in effect have superior exclusive business software?