Cloud Computing - where do we start?

There is too much to read about cloud computing these days. As usual there
are many folks writing for it and some against. Its so confusing for many
of us. Sometimes its scary too...  especially the arguments being made
about security, reliability and cost. One thing I can tell you ....everyone
will be using some form of the cloud 3 to 5 years from now. So the big
question as an enterprise IT shop is, when/where should we start?

If you want to be ahead of the curve.... here are my 2 cents....

Start by testing the water. Start with couple of projects in Dev and/or QA
environments. That will help you understand first hand the pros and cons of
using cloud. Each organization is different, so what works for one may not
work for other. So why not find out yourself what works for you than
listening to all pundits who confuses you.

From my experience, many new technology projects get delayed because of
the delay in getting the development environment ready. Instead of blaming
your Infrastructure team for that, why not cater to your business needs
immediately by using cloud for dev. That way, the dev team can start
creating working software first week itself.

Even for existing technologies, I keep hearing the complaint that QA is
not similar to Production (obviously due to many interesting reasons :).
Instead of complaining, why not start using the cloud so that you can
simulate production like environment. Since it is not real production
environment, you do not have to worry about confidentiality of data.

Once you get some experience behind your belt, you can decide how and
when to use cloud for production environment....

Thoughts?