In the last week, there's been a lot of noise around cloud computing, thanks to Microsoft's announcement today of its Dynamics CRM Live service launching and the joint Google-Salesforce.com announcement last week that paired Google Apps with Salesforce.com's CRM tools.

The idea of cloud computing is highly appealing, as it helps free up IT resources for generic or at least isolatable technologies so that IT can focus on projects that add differentiating value to their companies. Like packaged apps, suites, and outsourcing before it, cloud computing will be a key part of the IT toolbox in coming years.

But entrusting the cloud with parts of your IT -- especially now with the move by cloud providers to offer an entire platform, not just one or more apps -- does carry the same lock-in risk you get by depending on an enterprise app vendor's platform, whether that be Oracle Fusion, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM WebSphere, or SAP NetWeaver.

And it may carry more risk, since you dependent on not only the cloud provider's platform, but also the vendor's ability to provision it.

There have been a series of high-profile outages of cloud providers, including Salesforce.com a couple years ago, Research in Motion more recently, and Hewlett-Packard this week. So IT should be worried.

But not so much that it avoids cloud computing. The emergence of cloud providers will help counterbalance the power of the traditional enterprise app vendors, offering some leverage against their lock-in strategies.

And if you don't get too dependent on cloud providers' platforms and instead focus on their apps, it'll be easier to migrate from one cloud provider to another should the need arise. Just be sure you can get your data and any associated custom business logic out quickly and in a portable format. Otherwise, you're dead.

By the way, lock-in in and of itself is not bad. A truly well-designed ecosystem can make IT's job a lot easier, in a well way worth the loss of control that a vendor-owned environment requires. Just be sure that the areas you are locked into are the ones you choose to be locked into -- or, as a vendor would say, those for which you seek a technology partnership.