The challenge for any IT manager is how to meet business requirements with technology.  More often than not, those requirements dictate rapid deployment.  The cloud excels at this, since the infrastructure is already available and waiting to be used.  Rapid deployment, just as fast-food, does not guarantee quality, however.  In fact, the performance and reliability of public cloud services is currently variable and largely unpredictable.  Despite the high availability of fast food restaurants, people do not eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner.  They know that the quality of the food is sub-par, and it is intuitive to recognize that its usefulness runs out if speed and short-term cost are not the two foremost drivers.  The same holds true with the public cloud services.  They excel at speed-to-deploy and cost-of-entry for a solution.   And – just as with fast food, public cloud services are almost irresistibly appealing on the surface.  But after considering quality and long-term costs, it is clear that the best solutions remain in private clouds.