In a guest editorial for Forbes Mike Pearl, the cloud computing leader for international professional services giant PricewaterhouseCooper, succinctly and clearly explained just why the cloud is so awesome. Okay, maybe he didn’t use the word “awesome.”

That editorial, more properly called “Looking At Cloud Strategy Through The Lens Of Value,” starts with a high-level view of cloud strategy, and how vendors that don’t market cloud solutions as such are falling behind. Pearl likens the cloud to the role of credit in financial services, insofar as it enables an organization to grow and move beyond their physical assets. But putting aside the technology itself, there are really four distinct ways in which the cloud can add value to a business, he writes.

Pearl’s four “value lenses,” in short:

1. Cloud-enabled IT transformation: This is the kind of cloud computing shift that pundits like myself have spent years discussing, as IT’s role shifts from break-fix and general administration to service orchestration as customers no longer need to operate their own data centers.
2. Transforming internal business operations, by which Pearl means the kind of new-age business process workflows on which companies like Salesforce.com have built a reputation. Cloud customers can take advantage of software as a service (SaaS) and attendant mobile technologies to accelerate core business practices.
3. Innovate around new products and services – my personal favorite – refers to the kind of things that simply weren’t possible before the emergence of the cloud. Pearl uses the example of San Francisco’s cloud-built 311 non-emergency service request solution, but I’m thinking also of Dropbox and the like.
4.  Energize broader and more diverse channels and communities – That’s a lot of buzzwords to describe how the so-called social enterprise, again with mobility, can use the cloud to deliver increased collaboration inside and outside of the enterprise. That includes enabling departments to communicate with each other, as well as promoting better lines of support with outside channels.