As the significant benefits of SaaS and hybrid cloud services become more evident, it’s no surprise that organizations are moving more mission-critical applications – e.g., email, VoIP, online meetings, document storage/collaboration, etc., – to the cloud. This is different than CRM apps, which have been in the cloud for many years. If Salesforce.com is unavailable, the sales team is certainly impacted, but if email, IP, and/or VoIP communications are unavailable, the entire organization takes a productivity hit.
Moving your mission-critical apps to the cloud doesn’t absolve IT of responsibility for the quality of service though. If users can’t access email, they are not going to call Microsoft or Google or Amazon. They are going to call the IT help desk and the IT team will be expected to fix whatever problem exists.