At a minimum, to rebuild the application process requires a move to agile development in which overall development duration is trimmed through short development cycles and intense communication. That's just the start, though. The processes underlying development also need to be updated to support agile development. Continuous integration and deployment within a development environment reduce the errors that occur when developers attempt to merge code artifacts that have been developed in isolation for weeks or months.

Only by marrying quick resource availability with agile development practices will IT organizations achieve real application benefits from cloud computing.

IT operations are going to have to undergo enormous change as well. Taking applications that have been developed with agile methods and then placing them into a slow-moving operations environment in which every change is implemented manually creates a mismatch in the organization, and, crucially, hinders overall business agility.