IT is at the foundation of many of today's businesses and organizations. When done right, IT can vitalize a business' day-to-day operations from the inside. Employees can achieve more with less, bringing greater value to your customer base.

Certainly, doing IT right can be complicated. Beyond performance, there are many important factors to manage: security, reliability, cost, capacity, and scaling, among many others.   Every organization is different and so each needs a unique blend of on-premise and cloud-based IT resources.

Some people mistakenly believe that the cloud is primarily for enterprises. They think because these companies need to be able to scale a great many resources quickly that they can best benefit from the economies of scale the cloud enables. The cloud, however, offers much more than just massive scalability.

As Scott Mayers from rediCloud shares in The Cloud You Need, "The cloud can be many things to a company." By this he means that the wide range of cloud services available can play a vital role in increasing the agility, effectiveness, and profitability of a business.

One of the greatest benefits of cloud is that it brings big business capabilities to businesses of any size. Smaller businesses often cannot afford to outfit a complete data center with all the capabilities they need. Even large companies can find it difficult to acquire the expertise to implement effective security to protect company data and applications.

With the cloud, every business can leverage the investment a cloud provider makes. It doesn't matter how much capacity you need: every virtual machine and server is secure, whether you need one or ten thousand.

The same applies to enterprise-class performance and reliability. A small business running its mission-critical applications in the same cloud as a Fortune 500 company can rely on them with the same level of assurance.

And this is what makes the cloud the great equalizer. In the past, only the largest companies could afford to build a world-class data center. That's all changed with the cloud. Today it doesn't matter if your organization is a startup, established company, or multinational corporation; you still have access to the latest IT technology through the cloud.

How will the cloud transform your organization? Share your thoughts by commenting below.