Every where you turn these days everybody wants to talk about the new wonders of cloud computing. There's no doubt that cloud computing services will play a significant role in enterprise computing. After all, we're already seeing pretty broad adoption of Google applications across the enterprise.

But it is one thing to make use of relatively generic cloud computing services such as Google or Salesforce.com to augment an overall IT strategy, but it is another thing to deploy real mission-critical application on a service in the cloud.

To do that requires the ability to actually track and measure the performance of those services. After all, just because somebody says they can deliver a particular service over the Web better than an IT organization can doesn't make it necessarily true. And even if they can, how do you know they are doing that consistently and, if they aren't, what remuneration is due back to the customer.

What all this comes back to is what types of service level agreements will providers of cloud computing services going to put into place to back up their claims. And even if they do put those agreements in place, how will they actually be measured. We all know in many instances that service level agreements are not worth the paper they are written on.

A small step in right direction has come in the form of a new offering from Hyperic that allows IT organizations to measure the performance of services from Amazon. As one of the most popular cloud computing services being offered today, Amazon has developed a reputation for being pretty reliable. But a lot of the cloud services that are likely to find their way into the canopy of cloud computing services for the enterprise are not all going to backed up be companies with the resources of Amazon.

So the real question facing IT managers in the age of cloud computing is not whether they will embrace the concept or not. But rather how will they discern the hopelessly inept charlatans trying to make a quick buck from the companies that have made the investments truly needed to provide professional services to enterprise-class IT organization.