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For many companies the ‘private cloud' is the preferred approach and one that can deliver many of the benefits - centralised management, mobility, remote access and efficiency through scale. It also enables those companies still suffering the inertia of letting their data off their wholly-owned premises to find a middle ground, either in their own datacentre or as a single-tenant in somebody else's.

Some companies have even rented space in third party datacentres and installed their own cooling, physical security and power supply for the purposes of governance or simple ownership and piece of mind. From the end user's point of the view the experience is seamlessly similar to cloud computing.

Of course there are those who say compromise or ‘cloud-like' is not cloud. But there are issues with single-tenant software-as-a-service which cannot be ignored. US datacentres for example are off-limits to some UK businesses because of lingering concerns about the extent of the US Patriot Act and the differences between UK and US data protection laws.

Conversely some businesses don't need a reason, they simply want to keep their data, or certain business processes in-house. This is where compromises can be hugely beneficial and it's likely in time every business will find its own ‘cloud'. Traditional on-premise software vendors are also making giant strides into the business cloud arena, often through partnerships with ISPs large and small.

One boom area right now looks to be around unified comms, where Microsoft has made great strides providing software such as Office Communication Server and Sharepoint which are ideally suited to a hosted model that can deliver all the benefits of a cloud experience with none of the perceived risks.

Businesses embracing a hosted unified comms model are able to enjoy the benefits of convergence and web-based communication, for both voice and data, thus seeing a more collaborative, flexible and scalable service.

A further implication of a hosted, or cloud, model is also greater resilience. Laws of probability and economics state it's easier and more efficient for one dedicated service provider to manage thousands of businesses communications infrastructure effectively than it is for thousands to manage their own when that is not their core business.

Furthermore, communications is about enablement, a means to an end not a challenge in its own right. We expect it just to work. It is counter intuitive therefore to spend anytime yourself managing the nuts and bolts.

And that fact gets us closest to what ‘cloud computing' really means.

It's not about how its delivered, it is about freedom - freeing businesses to concentrate on what's important, about helping businesses to succeed because of their technology, not in spite of it.