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The cloud trend should continue to gain traction as both technology and business leaders embrace some of the practical realities involved in introducing not just a new set of technologies, but accompanying processes and financial models. At the same time, though, CIOs will face a significant hurdle in convincing business partners that there's more than meets the eye in terms of cost and effort. Remember a few years ago when people were asking, "Why aren't we using an ERP system?" Yogi Berra might say it's deja vu all over again.

Moving from a traditional hosting model to full-scale cloud computing model in one step is neither realistic nor prudent. So for the next several years, most enterprises will operate variations of a hybrid cloud model, one in which public and private infrastructure clouds and traditional data-center hosting coexist as part of the enterprise infrastructure ecosystem. This mixed environment will give CIOs a lot of room to experiment with low-risk public cloud applications before seriously exploring vendor solutions.

Experimentation will be a vital phase in determining the right hybrid cloud path for each organization.