Greg Ferro has republished an older post in which he compares Cloud Computing with public transport (and notes that nothing has changed in more than a year since he wrote the original article). His analogy is more than fitting; a perfect example is Google’s new Google Docs offering, where Stephen Foskett did a nice cost analysis of the unsupported service as compared to supported one.

I’m describing aspects of cloud computing in its various incarnations in my Next-generation IP Services workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop or we can organize a dedicated event for your team.

Translated into public transport terms: if you want to fly cheap, choose Ryan Air (in Google’s case, you pay 25 cents per gigabyte per year); if you want reasonable support and flexibility, use Lufthansa ($3.50 per gigabyte per year for Google Apps Premier Edition customers or 14 times more than the unsupported capacity).

If you’re unhappy with my choice of airlines, insert your own selection in the above paragraph ;)