Cloud computing: Early adopters share 5 key lessons

While some large enterprises have moved their IT infrastructure to a third-party managed service to save costs, small firms -- especially startups -- have come to rely on cloud services to cut initial outlays and help them focus on the core services and products.

Infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, such as Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), typically are used by larger enterprises to give research-and development groups flexibility in resources. For startups, eliminating the large capital expenditure of a data center at the outset has allowed many to reduce seed money and keep their burn rates that much lower, says Oliver Friedrichs, CEO of antivirus firm Immunet, which launched its first product last August.