Our topic this week centers on governance as a requirement and an enabler for cloud computing. We're going to talk not just about IT governance, or service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance. It's really more about extended enterprise processes, resource consumption, and resource-allocation governance.

It amounts to "total services governance," and it seems to me that any meaningful move to cloud-computing adoption, certainly that which aligns and coexists with existing enterprise IT, will need to have such total governance in place.

So, today we'll go round robin with our IT analyst panelists on their top five reasons why service governance is critical and mandatory for enterprises to properly and safely modernize and prosper vis-à-vis cloud computing.