In addition, outsourced cloud services may not conform to any of the Web services standards -- such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) -- upon which IT has built the enterprise's internal SOA.

Like creeping kudzu, rogue public-cloud-based services can become firmly ensnared in your IT environment and resist all subsequent efforts to extricate them. Once those uninvited guests are firmly ensconced in an organization's operations, enterprise IT may find itself severely hamstrung in its attempts to monitor them or rein them into conformance with standard practices for service designing, maintaining, monitoring, securing and versioning.

New tools are needed

In addition to these legitimate governance concerns, lack of familiarity with cloud computing is another worrisome factor. That may eventually dissipate as cloud computing moves into the mainstream, but that may not occur for a while.

"As cloud computing and SOA continue to converge, the need for a governance strategy, and good governance technology, will become more important." says David Linthicum, founder of the Linthicum Group, a SOA and cloud consultancy. "However, most of my clients are still kicking the tires around cloud computing, including creating strategy, and doing small projects to validate the infrastructure change. This will change quickly as we move towards the end of 2009, when more business processes, applications, and information will reside on remote clouds, and thus the need for governance increases."