"While cloud technologies are just now maturing, that's one of the easier challenges to solve," Bittman said during a webinar sponsored by Gartner discussing how to build private clouds.

Embracing the cloud can be a transformational shift in the way IT services are delivered to the business, bringing with it benefits around agility of and having IT that is customized to the needs of the business. But getting to that optimum point in is about more than what technology will be used or what public cloud provider will be hired. It's about having the processes in place to executive the strategy effectively, Bittman says.

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Private clouds are the first step many organizations will take in their cloud strategy. It's critical, Bittman says, for IT to consider why the cloud is being embraced before executing on the strategy. Most commonly, private clouds are used to deliver virtualization automatically, giving businesses the benefit of more efficient hardware, automatic provisioning of resources, all with the security of the system being on the company's premise with native security features in place. But there still needs to be a reason for the business to invest in a private cloud, and to determine that, the IT team needs to work with the business units to determine what problems they face and how IT can be used to solve them.