Many organizations question exactly how aggressively they should adopt the cloud. The key, Gens says, is to put that question in a market context as to where peer companies are in the process. Is your industry an early adopter, is it in the early or late majority, or is it a lagging industry for the cloud? "Folks are pushing hard on cloud, and I believe we're at the front of the early majority in most markets," he says. It's important to make sure your enterprise is working at a pace that's relevant to your industry sector.

3) What's the right model for cloud adoption?

There are fundamental questions that the highest levels of an enterprise executive team must consider if they're moving to the cloud, Gens says. One of the major differentiating factors is to embrace a public or private cloud model, with the difference being who is managing the cloud. In a private cloud the IT user still has control over cloud management, whereas in a public cloud, it is managed by the provider. Gens says an increasingly common structure is a managed private cloud, which is dedicated, single-tenant cloud infrastructure in a public cloud environment. A variety of players offer such services, including Terremark, a Verizon company, and Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. As connections to public clouds continue to improve through VPNs and direct Ethernet links, those managed private clouds become an attractive option that allows for the of a while leveraging the economies of scale of a public cloud.

4) What's the right organizational structure for your cloud?

Once a choice is made relative to migrating to the cloud, the next question is how it will be managed. IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant says 44% of respondents to the CIO survey reported that new roles have been created in their IT shops after migrating to the cloud, while 69% said their IT shop has to rapidly expand its skillset to manage the cloud.