CIO — This weekend saw the publication by Joe Weinman, coiner of the term "Cloudonomics," of a blog post called "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy: The 10 Laws of Behavioral Cloudonomics". Joe has published a great deal analyzing the economics of cloud computing, much of which illustrates that cloud computing can provide significant financial benefits. But this latest post is a must-read, because its implications are crucial to every IT organization.

Certainly, the published case studies and examples would seem to dictate that cloud computing should be aggressively considered as the foundation of infrastructure initiatives; however, all too often one encounters an attitude that can only be characterized in a fashion akin to a joke ascribed to economist reactions to various real-world outcomes: "Sure it works in reality, but will it work in theory?"

I repeatedly engage in discussions with IT executives who bring up various putative shortcomings in public cloud computing offerings, citing questions of personnel security, data integrity, virtual machine protection, and so on. Many times, when I query the status of these issues within their own organizations, I hear that their own practices fall far short of what cloud providers offer; however, when evaluating public cloud service providers, the standard is not "is this an improvement over what I can do on my own?" it's "does this meet the very highest standards I can think of?"

In other words, to quote Voltaire, the best is the enemy of the good, with executives choosing to stick with broken processes and inadequate measures rather than moving to an offering that, while perhaps imperfect, represents a significant step upward over their current environment.

And, by the way, these positions are often propounded with fervor, not to say bombastic insistence. One can't help but feel that the weaker the argument, the louder the voice.

Joe's post brings another perspective forward, which indicates why a topic like cloud computing, which should be evaluated logically and dispassionately, is all too often the arena of rigid positions and rapid reactions. Essentially, he examines various elements of irrational decision-making, and applies them to cloud computing.

Some of the elements he identifies:

• The Endowment Effect — People value goods that they already own more than they would pay to acquire them. [Dan] Ariely [see below for a reference to his book] showed that for [...] hard-to-acquire Duke basketball tickets, students were willing to pay up to about $170, but weren't willing to sell them for less than $2,400. Add in the choice-supportive bias, which rationalizes selected options and discounts unselected ones, and a stubborn fondness for existing IT technology and organization assets can be understood.

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