All this stuff you're saying is possible and may very well be true eventually, but not in today's Enterprise-world.

On Enterprise-planet, all this "Cloud" talk is scary and you can't quickly conceptualize PCI compliance with some computer in the sky somewhere; nor can you conceptualize who/where a consultant will be to fix your problem immediately if a problem arises. Your IT department are a bunch of inflexible people who refused to learn anything beyond what they were using 20 years ago and will tell you "Cloud isn't safe! Didn't you hear on the news how such-n-such got hacked?" I have no problem accepting that you're right; I'm just telling you that Enterprise-world doesn't care how right you are. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. There's no thought-process beyond that point. You join the company, learn how they do things and do your best not to rock the boat or suggest any new fancy things that might make your coworkers antiquated skillset obsolete... or you will be back-stabbed.

I work for a semi large Network and Hosting provider in Europe that is trying to provide Cloud for our Enterprise customers. We have banks and large financial firms that are "very excited" about the project, which basically means that they understood the buzzwords.

Cloud in the Corp. world normally means VMWare vCloud (which we are now offering) or just VMWare ESX hosted in a remote datacenter.

So "the cloud" does exist in the Corp. world, its just that they are on average 5 years behind the rest of the tech world. I also think that a lot of these companies need to be 5 years behind, as their decision process on anything except cost savings normally takes months to complete with feature creep etc.

They also need to be 5 years behind so that all of the tech is proven before they put the noose on.

I have worked in enough enterprises that the above is both true and false. True in the pathological cases, false among some surprising leaders. I have seen people get fired for choosing Oracle and IBM, massive investments by enterprises into Amazon cloud (they're $6b and rising), adoption of (actual) agile processes and cloud platforms.

PCI compliance is a solved problem, whether it can be used as a cloud cudgel says more about the state of knowledge and power at a place than reality.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

nice writing and all, but sir you have no first hand clue about corporations. not everybody is using new cool toys of the day as backbone of their whole company. For example i work at the bank, the whole core banking package is basically app build in pl/sql on top of oracle db. i like cool new technologies, but to even think they would run in next 20 years anything else than their super-cluster is funny and ridiculous, and... stupid. Some non-critical apps like HR, timesheets and whatnot? Sure, have it in SAP (why isn't anybody discussing this super massive pile of crap? compared to that, oracle's offerings are slick cool lean easy-to-use tiny gadgets). Or some MS/IBM solutions.

Let's not forget quality support cost a fortune, and that quality part is more important than some numbers on budgeting spreadsheet. Bear in mind, these static part of IT budget are carved in stone, nobody is questioning them.

You could do with toning down the personal attacks. "no clue", "stupid" - these do nothing to add to the conversation.

Your anecdotal experience doesn't necessarily translate to all corporations.

Amazon doesn’t have any control of its IP, Oracle does. Public clouds are becoming commoditized just like a majority of x86 vendors and eventually they'll abandon the low margin business or be required to increase pricing. Not every organization is going to move to a public cloud and therefore the areas of real growth in cloud is private and hybrid, which Amazon doesn't do. What happens when your startup company grows to an Enterprise and you start having governance requirements that don't allow you to run in a public cloud? You can't go private with Amazon. Oracle cloud allows you to seamlessly move from private, hybrid to public cloud and back, providing cloud goers freedom of choice with different levels of security and integration.

Amazon does not provide SLA agreements at all. I don't think people are necc. disagreeing with your vision of how things should be, but the fact is, enterprise software just doesn't work the way you're describing.