A study published earlier this year by CA and the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and security group surveyed over 900 IT professionals in the U.S. and Europe about their perceptions, predictions, and practices as on-site systems migrate to the cloud.

The results are particularly striking as they reveal some of the obstacles that cloud computing faces from those who are often responsible for helping implement and maintain a company's technology infrastructure.

Key findings from the study include the following:

In a recent article Venkat S. Devraj looks at the ways in which IT departments going to have to prepare themselves for the cloud, whether they want to make the move or not. He contends that part of the struggle with cloud implementation is not the technical obstacles. "The struggles have not emanated necessarily from lack of desire, budget or technology leadership," he writes, "but from cultural challenges."

These challenges include a perceived shift in power dynamics as self-service models muddy the line between where IT operations and end-users. He believes that IT personnel fear that end users will be granted administrative privileges that will make their activities difficult to oversee and control and will, in turn, increase IT's workload. He also suggests that the cloud will blur some of IT's internal silos, as cloud-based delivery models challenge some of the separations between people in charge of servers, storage, databases, software, and so on.

As organizations adopt cloud technologies - either sanctioned by IT or not - it remains to be seen how this will impact IT departments. Will it be, as some have suggested, the end of IT as we know it?