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The BBC will be forced to run endless repeats because of the cuts, so were told.

Good. I'd love to see a repeat of a documentary from the '90s about a charming man called Alan Sugar.

Particularly the bit where a member of staff asks about email. Sugar gets particularly irate at the mention of this passing fancy.

Drawing himself up to his full height, he bellows: "Email? Bladdy email! Down chew talk to me abart bladdy email. You want me to EMAIL your wages to you, eh? See how you like that!"

Lovely man. He must be a joy to work for. I can't understand why people keep resigning. He's a visionary. He was right in every aspect about email wasn't he?

Well, apart from being wrong.

I wonder what the great man would have to say about cloud computing? I only ask because, to some people, Alan Sugar is the poster boy for the channel. And some say the channel hasn't been famously open minded about investing in new opportunities; they'd rather do an Alan Sugar. 

Simon Howitt, channel director at Outsourcery, is hoping to change this mindset because, he says, the customers want it. Like Alan Sugar's hapless employee, they're starting to smuggle these new fangled ideas into work. 

"In many instances channel players are lagging behind their customers experiences and as such don't promote the virtue of the cloud," says Howitt.

This will not deter customers, he says, they'll just go elsewhere for advice. The channel needs to respond to this and create their own position and strategy for the cloud.

"They need a cloud champion or champions within their business who will passionately promote the virtues of the cloud," he says.

As technology is consumerised, all kinds of applications will become inexplicably popular. A bit like Alan Sugar.

Claaaaad computing? Dan chew towk to me abart clard computing!

There's a funny list circulating on the web of the Ten Most Pointless Phrases in technology PR. 'World's first' isn't on it. But it should be.

Juniper Networks has launched Junosphere, which appears to be a cloud based testing system for service provides and enterprise network designers. 

The rationale, I think, is to replace an expensive and limited testing lab with a much more versatile cloud based system of testing which is not only faster, it's cheaper to run too.

At least I think that's what they said, because Juniper has chosen to surround the Junosphere Lab announced with a nebulous cloud of meaningless marketing terms.

It's a 'new, first-of-its-kind, virtual environment which sets to revolutionise the way service providers and enterprises design, test and operate networks' says the release. 

Ahem. I'm no expert in this field, but it's not new and it's not the first of its kind. SOASTA has been running a service like this for Verizon for some time. 

The bottom line though, is that Junosphere Lab allows companies to "rent" labs, speed up modelling projects by 30% and cut costs by up to 90%. Which is pretty good.

So why didn't they just go with the facts?

At a Billy Graham-style rally in London last week, Marc Benioff told his converts to reject their government and follow him into the cloud. It was all very humbling.

They can make you feel very small, these charismatic CEOs of billion dollar corporations.

But Marc Benioff has got a knack of addressing  an audience and making it seem he's only interested in talking to you. 

So, yes, there were a few other people there, but I still insist that Benioff gave me an exclusive interview (the other people there - analysts, newspaper journalists, people off the telly - were just MicroScope wannabes anyway) 

Benioff leaned over, put his microphone to his lips, and whispered conspiratorially in my ear. He told me something about the UK government that made me feel terribly small again. 

Your government's reliance on G Cloud sucks, he said. I'm paraphrasing. 

In the US, Benioff said, the federal government plans to close half of its data centres in the next few years (in fact, the figure is 800 data centres by 2015, 40%). 

Britain could emulate this by investing in cloud computing, he argued. "My message is: go cloud or die."

Given the influence of visiting UK bigwigs, don't be surprised if the UK government announces new cloud computing targets. I'd be surprised if Francis Maude knows the difference between day care and data centres.

These charismatic US CEOs are incredibly influential. In the last government, Cisco's man in the UK had the ear of Peter Mandelson. It's obvious that Salesforce obviously has legions of believers who see Benioff as some sort of messiah. 

"If you think that was bad, you should see some of the Salesforce events in America," said one analyst.

Benioff is not against all data centres, however, He announced plans for Salesforce.com to open a UK data centre in 2012. "We should shut all the inefficient data centres," he said.

Panic can set in when a cloud service is over subscribed. In their desperation to keep the plates spinning, the staff and systems will bumble all over the place, like a team of Norman Pipkins, the comic creation of Norman Wisdom. 

Are you about to experience the Wisdom of the cloud? Craig Beddis, regional SVP at UC4 Software, seems to think so.

There is no doubt that enterprises can benefit from putting applications in the cloud to take pressure off their own internal systems, Beddis writes.

However IT managers need to ensure that the cloud provider can cope with spikes in demand or they may experience periods of downtime, perhaps even caused by high usage from the cloud provider's other customers.

Where business-critical applications are moved into the cloud and any downtime could have serious repercussions, businesses must ensure these issues are written into the SLA with the provider to guarantee even high levels of capacity and therefore uptime.

Where possible, IT managers should try to provide as much information as they can to the cloud provider about anticipated level of demand and when and why they should occur, which can be monitored using intelligent automation tools.

Even if specific capacity levels aren't stipulated in the SLA, IT managers can communicate expected high levels to the provider as soon as they are aware of them, which is mutually beneficial as it helps the provider manage and plan their systems and allows the customer to better manage the relationship and therefore levels of service, even if it's not in the formal SLA.

Mike Ramsey, a fictional IT manager, runs the IT operations at a large UK retailer with 40 stores across the country. One of Mike's biggest challenges is how to maximise sales from the company's website and has spent the last five years building a sophisticated e-commerce system. Last year he began looking at ways to cut costs and make customer transactions more efficient and decided to outsource this service to a cloud provider.

By putting customer transactions in the cloud and allowing a third party to carry them out, all customers' details were held on the cloud provider's server. Formal SLAs meant that Mike knew there was high security of this data and if this server went down as it was mirrored in a back-up so that transactions could be carried out 99.99% of the time.

However, when a new online marketing promotion meant that on one day 50% extra customers accessed the site, the transaction system slowed down and many prospective customers became frustrated and left the site without placing an order. 

When he enquired about the problem with the cloud provider, he was told that capacity was too high for the provider to carry out all the transactions with other external traffic their server was experiencing at the time. They apologised but said that this will happen from time to time and that no form of compensation was available as it was not stipulated in the SLAs.

Craig Beddis, the regional software vice president at UC4 Software, says if you don't get your cloud supplier right first time, it'll be ruinously expensive to change.

Investing in cloud services is not a new thing but what's on offer is getting better and better. However it should be planned carefully, especially if a business is putting critical applications into the cloud, to ensure data is secure and easily available. 

Every cloud provider promises different things - set out in service level agreements (SLAs) - so these should be considered when choosing a cloud provider to make sure you're getting what you need and are covered when things go wrong. This is just as important when moving from one cloud provider to another - data must be transferred securely and service levels must be upheld in the transition.

Let's take a fictional example. David manages the back office financial processes at a UK car dealership company. With the main showroom just south of London and four regional showrooms across the UK, David has to ensure that all the company's sales and revenue figures are collated for a senior management report at month end. 

Data from the five sales teams used to be inputted onto a cloud-based database but the service was unreliable and regularly unavailable. After two years David selected a new cloud provider that offered full access in its SLA as well as enhanced functionality. However he faced huge challenges in extracting data from the old provider to the new one, with vital data loss in the transfer process and errors in month end reports, none of which are covered by either provider's SLAs.

As a partner and a senior manager at Deloittes technology Consulting Practice, John Winstanley (left) and Bhavesh Morar spend all their time talking to big corporations who want advice on cloud computing.

These retail, consumer and life sciences giants all desperately want to talk about infrastructure as a service. Or so it would seem.

Maybe they're lonely and they just want someone nice to talk to, who isn't involved in their office politics. They certainly don't seem interested in signing any purchasing orders.

It's known in the business as Let's Have a Meeting Syndrome (LHMS), and it's got worse in the recession.

Anyway, these window shoppers have a good excuse not to sign off an infrastructure as a service project: "In large scale corporate back offices, the state of readiness is way behind the marketing material," says Winstanley.

Besides most of the corporates that Winstanley and Morar consult with are likely to be bound by strict compliance regulations. In which case, they need to know specifically which servers are being used to secure their data and where they are. Tying down details like this doesn't fit in with the ethos of cloud services.

Meanwhile, companies are adopting some of the properties of cloud services in their own data centres. They might transfer Unix platforms to Linux and organise partitioning far more efficiently on blade farms. They're packing more into their existing infrastructure and improving the utilisation of their hardware.

A high street retailer, for example, was only getting 17 per cent utilisation out of its Oracle/IBM platform, whereas other companies can push to 80 per cent.

Cloud services might not sell, but cloud computing techniques will still blight IT sales. Who is going to buy anything from you when they can triple the output of their data centre without seeing a salesman?

That's a double whammy. It's bad enough that all those sales meetings are a waste of time and money. But think of all the poor estate agents, removal men and data-centre-in-a-crate salesman. They're not gong to be doing much business either. That's two hidden costs in the same mortifying incident.

Hey, hey, you, you, get offa my cloud! Not my words, but the words of a service provider that decides you are surplus to their requirements, for whatever reason.

But the of process of moving between cloud offerings is punishing, says Vladimir Jirasek non executive director CSA UK & Ireland and member of CAMM. As is moving back to the internal service (internal cloud). 

"This is especially painful in SaaS where the application is bespoke and export of the data is not standardised," says Jirasek. Salesforce, for example.

"I see the migration from SaaS application as huge hidden cost that will bite many companies should they ever dare to leave the SaaS provider!

"The cost, complexity and disruption of migration from SaaS might be so huge that the company will rather stay with the cloud provider, being effectively locked in for a long time."

However, there's good news if you are in PaaS and IaaS. "The lock in is not as big problem as there is more standardisation on the platform and infrastructure level," he says.

There's an awful lot that can go wrong with service level agreements (SLAs) on cloud-based services says Craig Beddis, Regional SVP at UC4 Software.

Services in the cloud are not available when there is an outage.

Gradually we're starting to see businesses of all sizes using cloud providers for various services, with limited upfront costs and greater flexibility. 

You may think this sounds too good to be true. It an be when one of the main risks is some sort of outage which makes your data temporarily unavailable. In this case you'd expect service level agreements (SLAs) with your cloud provider to compensate you for not being able to access your essential services.

Unfortunately many SLAs do not cover companies for unexpected events such as a data centre network being cut off by somebody digging through some cabling.

Let's say Mr X is the CIO of a recruitment software company, supplying to more than 400 recruitment businesses across the UK. The specialist software is offered as proprietary (i.e. the client owns the license and data is stored in the customer's server) or is accessible via a cloud-based service. Since the recession the company has seen a huge growth in smaller recruitment businesses developing and choosing their software using the cloud-based model for the greater flexibility and lower upfront cost. 

As the number of clients grew and database functionality expanded, Mr X is concerned when he receives 80 complaints from clients unable to access their databases. When he contacts his cloud provider he's told that there was an outage on one of their servers which would not be rectified until later that week, and that unfortunately this incident was not covered under his SLA. As a result Mr X had to inform account managers of the issue and compensation was given.

Meanwhile, his boss is furious that money was wasted on a problem that wasn't even their fault.

Vladimir Jirasek, non executive director CSA UK & Ireland and member of CAMM, speaks from bitter experience about a cloud heist that went wrong.

"I have had experience of migrating to Cloud and between different SaaS clouds," he laments.

The hidden costs differ between various delivery model (IaaS to SaaS). Some IT managers do not realise that in IaaS the responsibility to manage operating systems and application still rest on their shoulders.

The cloud provider is here a mere virtual HW provider. Hence the hidden cost for the company is a realisation that the bulk of IT responsible for application integration and possibly for infrastructure management (operating system layer) is still needed.

The same applies to PaaS, he says, but here the CIO is responsible for application integration only.

Ten years ago, Winston Bogarde was a very good footballer. He must have been, because show biz club Chelsea paid him forty thousand pounds a week! That was a lot of money in them days.

So he must have been pretty handy. Mind you, I never saw him play. I don't think anyone saw him play. He was at Chelsea for 18 months and the nearest he got to the pitch was the subs bench.

Football clubs live in a parallel world. Where else would somebody pay a vast amount of money for something they never use?

Oh, I just thought of an example. Cloud computing customers.

If you meet anyone who thinks that cloud computing is a pay per use model, send them to me; I've got this bridge in the City of London they might like to buy.

If you put an application in the cloud and no one uses it, does it cost you money? Why, yes it does, mate.

The hourly compute charges are not based on how you use an application but for the machines that are reserved for you should you use that app.

So anyone who orders an app and doesn't use it probably assumes they won't be charged for it. Boy are they in for a shock when the bill comes in.

Deputy heads will roll. Sack the manager!