6 biggest cloud computing myths

Here's the pitch: The cloud turns sunk capital expenditure into flexible operational expenditure. Nevertheless your company may not want that. "The assumption is that there's an economic preference for opex over capex," says Mark White, CTO of Deloitte Consulting's research practice. "Yet not every business wants opex; some want capex." The years of friendly capex tax depreciation left on a data center may be most important.

The fact that it isn't done much doesn't mean that it can't be done at all. Balbinot, for instance, is running a billion dollar business' core retail systems in the cloud.

The business

Most CIOs funnel cloud savings to the business. However there's no law against reinvesting in IT. "I take some of my cost savings and put it into team building," says David Riley, senior director of information systems for Synaptics. "We need to keep morale high."