Question: "What's your plan, Lucas?" Jason Green, CEO of AllRoad Parts, is meeting with Lucas Massey, IT director, and Kelly Summers, CFO, to discuss AllRoad Parts' Web hosting costs. "Right now, Jason, we're fine. Our hosting service processes our transactions on time, and we've had no real outages, but..." Lucas trails off. Kelly can't stand this. "Well, we're fine until you look at the bills we're running up. Our hosting costs have increased 350 percent in a year." "Yes, Kelly, they have, but our volume's gone up 400 percent," Lucas replies. "True enough, but..." Jason has had enough and interrupts. "

We've been over this before. No need to rehash it. We all agree that our hosting costs are too high. Lucas, I asked you to look into alternatives. What have you got?" "The cloud." "The what?" Kelly hopes he's not losing it. "The cloud," Lucas repeats. "We move our Web servers and databases to the cloud." Jason is curious. "OK, Lucas, I'll bite. What's the cloud?" "It's a movement-I'd call it a fad, except I think it's here to stay." "So how does it help us?" Jason asks. "We lease server capability from a third party." Kelly's confused. "But we're already doing that from our hosting vendor." "Well, it's different," Lucas explains. "We can lease on very, very flexible, pay-as-you-go terms. If we have a run on a new popular item, like those hot new Fox suspensions, we can acquire more resources-they use the term provision- we can provision more resources." "You mean each day? We can change the terms of our lease on a daily basis?" Kelly thinks that's not possible because she knows the terms of their contract with the current hosting vendor.

1 Why is the cloud the future for most organizations?

2 How do organizations use the cloud?

3 How can AllRoad Parts use the cloud?

4 How can organizations use cloud services securely?

5 What does the cloud mean for your future?