Very interesting discussion. But will the emerging cloud computing business really change everything? I remember the outsourcing discussions in the nineties when people (and of course outsourcing vendors) tried to convince us that the end for internal IT has come and find that we have a much better and realistic understanding nowerdays.

Of course it is very likely that in the future we have a bigger percentage of oursourced services. But who would outsource a business critical service (which is quite different to a private e-mail account at Google or other services providers) to a cloud provider who offers no clear escalation process with people who are accountable for that? I would not do this and I would not recommend this. And who has a different provider for every single service which would mean managing many different vendors? That seems to me quite hard to manage.

So it is like in production/logistics. You need the right number of vendors and you still need to have a trustful relationship with them otherwise production would be in danger. I cannot imagine how else we will be able to do our job which will still involve in the future the responsibitliy for IT systems and data (including to meet all the regulatory requirements) no matter how we source the services (internal or external).