The CEOs of leading companies are already striving to create an agile business model – one that responds quickly to competitive pressures and shifting market demands. Commercial agility often requires a corresponding accelerated business technology deployment. Meaning, the IT requirement is for applications to be provisioned in hours – not weeks or months.

That’s a tall order for many corporate IT departments. Regardless, it must be done. More often than not, it’s accomplished via a cloud services-based methodology.

Savvy executives that proactively migrate their IT infrastructure to a cloud-centric architecture will generate new revenue that could surge by a factor of three from 2011 to 2017, according to the latest market study by IHS.

Global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion this year – that’s up by 20 percent from $145.2 billion in 2013. By 2017, enterprise spending …