Many IT organizations decide to pursue cloud computing through a develop-and-test cloud initiative. Often the impetus is that software engineers are turning to Amazon Web Services and IT management wants to prevent it. The thinking goes that by offering developers a local cloud, they can be dissuaded from using a public offering.

That's OK as far as it goes, but it misses the far larger point. Most IT organizations rolling out a developer cloud have only thought about optimizing one facet of applications: developers getting access to resources. They haven't thought about the other two elements of applications -- the development process and operating applications once in production.

Leveraging cloud computing for accelerated access to resources is a big win, but optimizing this element without optimizing the others does not speed applications into production or make them easier to update once in production. Speeding up one part of a process (and that's what application development is, a process) and leaving the other parts unchanged does not appreciably reduce overall deployment time.