It's not unusual for mid-sized companies to come to depend on cloud services, according to , vice president and principal analyst for Forrester's Infrastructure and Operations practice.

It is unusual for them to be more concerned with infrastructure than with applications, he says.

Small- and mid-sized businesses have kept pace with enterprises in their adoption of various cloud technologies, but tend to favor portfolios of software-as-a-Service (SaaS) accounts that give office workers access to new functions, rather than reliability functions dear to the hearts of data-center managers but invisible to most users, according to Bernard Golden, co-founder and former CEO of consulting company HyperStratus and a virtualization/cloud-computing columnist for CIO.com.

The interesting thing about mid-sized companies using the cloud for infrastructure is that most hosting providers haven't figured out how to handle that demand at a reasonable price for customers or profit for themselves.

"It's an issue about capacity management and utilization of resources," Staten says. "In a traditional outsourcing model all the costs are assigned to one client and amortized over time. For hosters offering cloud services, one company like Diesel Direct bursting capacity on Monday and dropping back Tuesday leaves some capacity unused. Hosters that can figure out when that's going to happen can resell that capacity to someone else, so they end up selling the same resource over and over, which is much more profitable. Most haven't figured out how to do that on a regular basis."