Leader: Grids - get your house in order first

Sitting outside your sunny time-share holiday home one day, you realise it's been a while since you had a proper look around the old place.

On inspection (perhaps with banana daiquiri in hand) you find some of the other time sharers have rummaged through your things while you've been away.

You feel violated and this whole time share thing suddenly seems like a bad idea.

It seems this fear of the abuse of shared resources has held some financial firms back from grid-computing time shares.

Companies with big demands for processing power are nervous about sharing resources with other firms, let alone potential competitors. They perceive the pay-as-you-go risk to be too high.

The demand is there for higher processing but how do you make it work before buying into a managed service time-share?

For some firms - smaller ones perhaps - the time share could be a good bet, if they have fewer resources and enough money. But larger financials are blessed with global offices full of computers. And the utilisation of those machines could be as low as 10 per cent of processing power.

That means a great deal of processing power is being wasted. And waste is not a word the board likes to hear.

CIOs need to recognise the potential power of their network and use the spare capacity, not for the sake of using it but to ensure they have done everything to warrant a business case for using a managed grid service.

As a result, it's likely that at least in financial services most interest in grid will be on internal projects, not the grand sharing of resources envisaged when the concept was first shaped.

After all, before buying into a shared holiday home it's worth making sure you haven't forgotten other plots of land lying around the world. Wasting resources is money down the drain.