Recently a continuing trend toward ITindustrialization has grown in popularity. IT services deliveredvia hardware, software and people are becoming repeatableand usable by a wide range of customers and service providers.This is due, in part, to the commoditization and standardizationof technologies, virtualization and the rise of service-orientedsoftware architectures, and (most importantly) the dramaticgrowth in popularity/use of the Internet and the Web. Takentogether, they constitute the basis of a discontinuity that amountsto a new opportunity to shape the relationship between those whouse IT services and those who sell them. The discontinuity impliesthat the ability to deliver specialised services in IT can be pairedwith the ability to deliver those services in an industrialised andpervasive way. The reality of this implication is that users of ITrelatedservices can focus on what the services provide them, ratherthan how the services are implemented or hosted. Analogous tohow utility companies sell power to subscribers, and telephonecompanies sell voice and data services, some IT services suchas network security management, data centre hosting or evendepartmental billing can now be easily delivered as a contractualservice. This notion of cloud computing capability is gatheringmomentum rapidly. However, the governance and enterprisearchitecture to obtain repeatable, scalable and secure businessoutcomes from cloud computing is still greatly undefined.This paper attempts to evaluate the enterprise architecturefeatures of cloud computing and investigates a model that an ITorganisation can leverage to predict / evaluate the ‘tipping point’where an organisation can make an objective decision to investin cloud computing. Current research results are attempting tobuild a quantitative and qualitative service centric frameworkby mapping cloud computing features with ValIT and COBITindustry best practices
