(Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara, California. To view the entire library of videos from other industry shows, Road Shows and product demos and interviews in our in-house studio, visit TMCnet Videos home page.)

What’s really behind the growth in cloud computing? According to Jake Sorofman, CMO at rPath, the cloud’s power is its agility and responsiveness, which removes the bottleneck between lines of business and IT. 

Services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (aka Amazon EC2), Sorofman said, are forcing the IT world to think differently. This new reality is rapidly becoming de facto, and resistance is, well, futile. Applications not purposefully transformed to on-demand services tend to go rogue, taking the path of least resistance to the cloud.

The cloud’s agility is especially appealing given current economic realities.

“A lot of IT organizations have declining OPEX (News - Alert) budgets, increasing expectations for speed, increasing scale, and increasing change,” Sorofman said in the interview. “The only way you can meet those objectives is through deep automation and self-service delivery of IT services. “

That move toward automation and self-service is putting pressure on CIOs, who are being held to a higher standard than in the past despite having to do more with less. Incremental improvement to IT services is no longer acceptable; today, service levels must be boosted not over months but in mere minutes. To put it another way,

Because of the recession, cost is an integral part of the cloud’s development. New technologies and systems mean increasing demands for scale and speed can be met without adding human resources.

Sorofman said enterprises and providers adopting cloud computing usually find it works best to start by looking at industrial automation tools already in place, and build on those to remove the human factor from IT service delivery and make the self-service delivery model into reality.

Of course, this will require IT architecture changes, as well as policy changes. Software infrastructure must be standardized, resources must be made readily available for reuse, and IT management must be centralized. Successful IT organizations, and the CIOs that run them, Sorofman predicted, will focus on elasticity, enabling commissioning and de-commissioning of workloads based on demand.

A truly unified on-demand infrastructure, it should be noted, requires standards that are not developed yet, although the ball has started rolling in that direction. 

“These are early days for cloud computing,” Sorofman said. “Working groups are forming around standards. The conversations are taking place, which is great. It will be some time before you start seeing industry-accepted standards. We’re starting to see de facto standards emerging. Amazon’s API is an example of that; it’s the de facto standard for cloud infrastructure, just by virtue of critical mass of users.”

Watch the full video interview for more discussion about self-service IT infrastructure, cloud standards, and related topics.