Although Corporate America expects to spend $180B on cloud services, GovCloud Network's Kevin Jackson says the field is still basically like the Wild West. Kevin's hoping to chart the frontier during Bisnow's Data Center Investment and Conference Expo (we call it DICE) starting at 8:15am, July 15, at The Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, VA. "[Many companies] don't know really what the cloud is. They think it's just storage," Kevin tells us. Instead, he explains, the cloud in its truest form involves off-shoring all IT functions to a third party—not just storage, but responsibility for handling systems and security. And it's more than just academic: Companies that only half-heartedly adopt cloud services will see a real cost impact. “The whole economic model of the cloud is shared services. If you can't share services when you go to the cloud, it will cost you more money,” Kevin says. “That's what causes a lot of the cloud failures.” And it's more than just allowing a host to run your systems: When companies truly adopt the cloud, they adopt an infrastructure that's already in place, and systems and software used by a cloud provider. Kevin says that at some firms, a lack of understanding about the cloud could be coming from the company's internal IT operation, a department that is likely working in survival mode, because workers there feel that budgets and hence their jobs are potentially threatened by a move to the cloud.

The Federal government has been a massive adopter of the cloud in the true sense of the word, most recently with the CIA farming out its security-sensitive computers to a $600M Amazon system. And making a complete shift to the cloud has saved the government (not an organization known for its frugality) money, to the tune of $5.5B/year, according to recent stats. To hear more cloud-related insights from Kevin, join him and more than 20 other national data center experts and speakers at DICE, July 15 at The Ritz in Tysons Corner, VA. Sign up here!