There is broad agreement across the IT industry that cloud computing presents a compelling opportunity for the delivery of IT as a highly efficient, dynamic service. But the market - at this immature stage - is marked by hype and confusion, with vendors for the most part pushing their own often-narrow interpretations of cloud.

Some, however, are putting real substance behind the vision. Fujitsu, for one, recently outlined a blueprint designed to help CIOs fashion strategic plans. It proposes a series of practical stages with different on-ramps and break points, recognising that organisations are at different points in their business investment cycle and aligning various phases of cloud with business benefits.

"The aim is to provide a methodology and an approach that will help organisations understand where they sit in the cloud transformation journey," explains Fujitsu CTO Marc Silvester - and where they go next. "The method is there to break up the process and to position the organisation to be able to fully realise the benefits of cloud, in line with its technology adoption preferences and as it progresses with its transformation."

The four-stage strategy blends practical evolution to cloud with a longer-term transformation: it starts with the shift of traditional infrastructure components - storage, server and network IT assets - to a cloud base. This provides businesses with computing power "on tap", and brings the promise of rapid ROI from proven, repeatable approaches.

That is followed by the transfer of the customer's application portfolio to the cloud. The goal is the creation of an agile application service portfolio that reduces the maintenance burden, with application services consumed and charged by capacity.

"Some of these early stages, where infrastructure and applications are delivered and consumed as a service, can be seen as natural and evolutionary," says Silvester. "But cloud becomes revolutionary as we edge towards more mature thinking."

At the more advanced stages, the customer can select and subscribe to IT resources and business processes, eventually servicing end-to-end processes through an open, App Store-like marketplace. The end-game and great underlying value of cloud is the point when it transparently makes software and data available everywhere, Silvester maintains.

This "stateless" model - supported by cloud operating systems such as Microsoft's Azure - facilitates much greater scalability and reach than conventional business computing options. Information and software become universally accessible, are constantly updated and can easily be published for consumption.

By selecting and subscribing to IT resources and business processes that reside and are managed in the cloud, organisations will finally be able to optimise business efficiency to match demand, using assets and processes provisioned just-in-time, says Silvester.

"Eventually," he adds, "cloud services become dynamic maps of highly automated business activities."