You only have a Scale of 1: Why org's should consider cloud solutions

Recently there have been a number of occasions when I have been asked to explain what the potential benefits are for an enterprise organisation of a "cloud" deployment over a typical enterprise CPE (customer premises equipment) deployment.   There is so much hype, and marketing generated positioning that tries to pretend that it is a complex value proposition, where in reality the answer is fairly simple ... simple common sense I think.

Firstly, the value proposition for "cloud" and its potential benefits are not complex (that does not necessarily mean that the techniology underneath is not); and secondly the difference between an in-house controlled CPE deployment and a cloud based deployment can simply be articulated as one of scale.  If one is deploying an in-house CPE solution, no matter how small or large the organisation, the only economy of scale benefit that can be gained is directly related to the size of your organisation .. the level of aggregation is always 1.