Skytap has announced the "Top Ten Reasons Enterprises will Accelerate Cloud Adoption with Virtual Labs in 2009." In 2008, the momentum behind cloud computing increased with many vendors announcing solutions, including Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google AppEngine, and Rackspace Mosso. As enterprises finalize their budgets for 2009, many are now including cloud computing to achieve near-term cost reductions.

However, aside from cost reductions, there are many other compelling reasons for enterprises to adopt cloud computing. The following cites the top 10 reasons enterprises will accelerate their cloud computing adoption in 2009 with virtual lab automation:

• Eliminates infrastructure constraints: Cloud-based services allow companies to dynamically scale virtual environments quickly and cost-effectively based on business demand.
• Turns upfront Cap-Ex into Op-Ex: Cloud services provide the same powerful computing resources without the large upfront investment. Additionally, usage is billed hourly, enabling organizations to pay for what they use without investing in unused capacity.
• Brings software to market faster: Development organizations can support critical business initiatives by delivering applications faster using the cloud. A virtual lab enables development and testing environments to be provisioned immediately and built-in collaboration tools cut unproductive cycle time, resulting in shortened delivery schedules.
• Applications run unchanged in a virtual lab: Companies do not need to modify or rewrite applications for the cloud using a virtual lab, so they can use cloud resources as an extension of their onsite environments.
• Enables global team collaboration with a shared virtual data center: Developers and testers can collaborate and resolve problems on the same virtual machines in real time over the Web. Furthermore, by using the cloud, the problem of sharing large virtual machines between different geographically dispersed teams is eliminated.
• Accelerates provisioning time with a self-service model: Today, a typical quality assurance (QA) team spends more than 40 percent of their time provisioning environments.  A cloud-based virtual lab automation solution provides a self-service Web portal so development and QA professionals can deploy environments without involving an IT administrator.
• Increases software quality and predictability: Development and QA teams can achieve more test coverage and produce higher quality software using virtual lab automation. IT environments in the cloud can be suspended at the point of failure, allowing testers to "check in" the virtual machine configuration to a shared library. Developers can then debug the issue by launching the saved configuration and eliminate hours spent trying to replicate a defect.
• Reduces server sprawl: Cloud-based virtual labs have an easy-to-manage configuration library that helps enterprises manage, track and deploy virtual machines while eliminating underutilized physical hardware.
• Creates pre-production "sandboxes" to test the impact of production changes: The cloud allows IT operations to cost-effectively maintain a pre-production environment where changes can be tested before production deployment.
• Allows IT operations teams to focus on production uptime: Cloud-based virtual labs eliminate set-up and tear-down time, allowing IT operations teams to focus work on production systems rather than spending cycles on lab environments.