The Perfect storm for the Cloud

(I apologize in advance..Sorry, I had to use the storm + cloud pun. It just called to me.)
The rise in news and talk and implementations of the cloud occurring during an economic downturn and recovery period is no coincidence. When an organization is forced to cut costs and streamline its business processes, one of the first questions that is raised is "how can we improve our IT processes?". I worked at a company where the CEO came into the server room that housed all our infrastructure and said "how can we get rid of all this expensive equipment but stay up and running?". After the momentary shock to the department, one solution was to identify those processes that could be run virtually and use cloud computing to do so. I don't believe our company was the only one to experience this. I guarantee many companies had the same experience.