Knowing an organization’s data is safe and secure – and lowering the risk of expanding too much, too fast – are two of the reasons Michael Hugos believes cloud computing will continue to explode in usability and popularity over the next several years.

Hugos, a former CIO and a principal of the Center for Systems Innovation, is co-author of a forthcoming book on cloud computing, and was profiled in a recent CFO.com article, “Certainties: Death, Taxes, and the Cloud.”

Cloud computing is certainly not without its share of controversy, where many concerns come from IT departments, says Hugos.

“Cloud computing is not happy news to many people in the IT world,” he says. “Most IT jobs are for system administration, and that’s going to be outsourced. It will be the equivalent of what happened to blue-collar manufacturing jobs here in the United States in the 1980s.”

For many companies, profits are directly tied to data centers, so Hugos says it’s hard to argue with the success many large companies have found so far in cloud computing, including Amazon, Google, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.

“In the showdown between security and profitability, profitability will win,” says Hugos. “I’m not suggesting that companies get rid of all their data centers in the next six months. But over the next four or five years, as they need to refresh their servers, I don’t see why they would want to continue adding hardware that is becoming obsolete.”