When he worked in IT for the Cole & Weber advertising firm in Seattle two and a half years ago, Neuman enlisted cloud services from a provider called Tier3, but had to bail because the , a victim of what he calls cloud sprawl - the uncontrolled growth of virtual servers as developers set them up at will, then abandoned them to work on other servers without shutting down the servers they no longer need.

Whereas he expected the developers to use up to 25 virtual servers, the actual number hit 70 or so. "The bills were out of control compared with what the business planned to spend," he says.

CLOUD SECURITY:

He tried modifying policies around use of the virtual servers so they could be used only from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. But that didn't work either because inevitably deadlines had to be met that required violating the new policy.

Ultimately, the business built its own VMware cloud that supports up to 100 virtual servers.