BY ARUN RAO, Cloud Computing Journal, 04.30.2010

Reuters reported last week that the ash cloud over Europe and the resulting disruption in airline schedules and has caused a huge backlog in supply chain shipments from Asia. Every day, millions of tons of goods are shipped from ports in Asia and backlogs of several days will put a huge strain on manufacturers and distributors not only in the region, but around the world.

This means data processing systems will be strained with huge data volume in the next few weeks. If system utilization was already running at 95% capacity, as are most over-optimized environments these days, they will need additional / elastic capacity to handle the load, or risk impacting shipments and manufacturing lines.

This situation, with its immediate business consequences and short-term nature, is the best use-case yet for Cloud deployment (Private or Public) within an Enterprise IT environment.

Why?