Cloud computing has been a buzzword for a while and a required ingredient in recent vendor pitches. CMS vendor Kentico took a step forward recently when they became powered by Windows Azure and were added to the Windows Azure Marketplace. This means that you can now decide to deploy Kentico either on premise in your own IT landscape or using Windows Azure.

While Kentico were the first significant CMS vendor to make it onto the Marketplace, several other vendors have introduced different levels of Azure support, e.g.:

• Alterian brings Web and social media engagement solution to the cloud
• Composite: Free tool moves C1 CMS sites to Windows Azure
• Sitecore CMS Azure Edition
• Umbraco on Windows Azure

Many other CMS vendors will follow shortly, but beware: It takes a trained eye to separate marketing from reality.

In this case - as in many others - we looked behind the industry news headlines; we went looking for real implementations to give our own verdict. An early set of fresh experiences came from Kentico partner Bit-Wizards which recently announced six public websites build with Kentico on Azure.

From a business perspective, Azure offers a way for digital teams to leverage Microsoft datacenters around the world, but it does not mean you don't need IT savvy people on your team. You will still need those skills to enter into a dialogue with your implementation team around the many decisions required during the actual project.

Also, if you take a closer look at the Kentico support for Azure, you will find that Kentico as of today still only supports single-server setups, which means you cannot yet take advantage of some of scaling capabilities provided by Azure and typically associated with cloud computing.