The cloud is not about technology, it’s about business.

It’s about re-allocating your existing infrastructure to meet your business needs. Once you know your business goals then you can begin defining how your infrastructure is realigned.

This is tbe big shift in thinking that we are seeing at events like Intel Forecast, hosted today by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) at the Cloud Expo in New York.

Take the UBS Group as an example. It’s a company with $2.2 billion in revenues that has aligned its technology strategy behind its business strategy.

“Our client is at the center of everything we do,” said CTO Andy Brown in his keynote addtress at the Intel Forecast event. “How do they want it? When do they want it?”

It’s not as much new technology entering the supply chain, as it is the platform for business is changing. Companies are subject to a new business environmnent in which external suppliers are entering the supply chain. With those new suppliers comes a new element of risk that could potentially be a new threat vector. The quesiton becomes how to manage that risk.

In this new business environment, the market is increasingly driven by change. The market continually shifts and so does the enterprise infrastructure need to continually adapt. For UBS, that means adapting investment strategies on the fly. The better the analytics, the better you are going to be.

Data is at the core of this change. People are accessing data through variuous mobile platforms. Consumerization is changing how people interact with applications. Access to knowledge networks built on social is critically important. The more things in the social network, the bentter it will be.

At the bottom of it all is the cloud. It underpins everything.

To adapt, companies will increasingly build vertically integrated stacks that can essentially scale up and down with the ability to adapt to new data sources. Companies like Facebook and Google have built these types of infrastructures and others will emulate them.

Brown said UBC goes with services as much as possible. That means software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. PaaS is still relatively nascent but as an automated package it can mean buildng apps that go directly into an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. For example, Brown said that with Microsoft Windows Azure in particular, it is easy to create and deploy something in Visual Studio.

For IaaS, UBC will not use much public cloud infrastructure. It mostly consists of hybrd solutions.

Brown said the potential is to revolutionize IT through commoditty automation with the ability to leverage any cloud and the ability to make a policy driven decision that creates value, mostly in the software layer.

Brown said ODCA gives UBC the ability to industrialize the way compute is delivered by cloud providers. Design patterns can be reused. Open standards help establish uniformity. Most important is the need to be agile. To start and stop projects and scale with less investment.

But the real issue is about adapting to a new business envrionment, and worrying less about the technology you need to get you there.