Cloud computing is for suckers? Not for training and testing!

Perhaps you've read John Dvorak's article from last year, Stormy Weather for Cloud Computing, where he proclaims that cloud computing is for suckers. Now, while I wouldn't bank my entire enterprise on computing in the cloud, I can think of a few useful ways cloud computing can be a great solution.

1. Testing. This could be testing in a development or QA environment. More and more development teams are feeling the crunch economically, and are considering hosted solutions. Why not have a virtual lab? When you test away and get your system into a bad state, it is so easy to reset things back to a baseline state. But an even more clever use would be for off-site customer or usability testing. I have been in situations where we were doing customer testing and demos at a trade show, and getting the VPN connection to our SAP servers working was painful or inconvenient. Cloud computing would have made this easier, in my opinion.
2. Training. If your software environment is complicated (say, a NetWeaver or WebSphere environment), trying to arrange off-site customer training can be tricky. Instead of worrying about arriving to a customer's site with laptops fully loaded (and bogged down), why not use something like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud? You can have all of your images preloaded with whatever applications or server software you need, ready to go when you get to the customer's site. This training setup was actually used at Phurnace Software with much success.

What are some other uses? Please add your ideas to the comments section.

Photo by Flickr user ancawonka.