In 2011, people will come to recognize that the key to a hybrid strategy is proper placement of workloads depending upon cost and operational and compliance factors, and will create appropriate plans to leverage a mixed environment.

As IT organizations deploy their first cloud computing applications, they'll find achieving agility and elasticity is hard -- and requires new application architectures.

Implementing robust applications to run on less-than-robust infrastructure imposes design requirements for redundancy, failover, and session isolation. Designing elastic applications that can automagically grow and shrink in response to application load necessitates functionality that allows graceful on-the-fly configuration without human intervention.

As you might imagine, this demands a new set of technical skills for architects and software engineers. This pattern of new skills being called forth in response to the shift to a new computing platform is nothing new -- and won't change in the case of cloud computing, either. But every time an emergent platform collides with existing skill sets, IT executives are shocked anew that employees aren't prepared. Expect to see many, many articles next year about the technical skill challenges associated with cloud computing.

Operations will be challenged in three ways during 2011. The first challenge is associated with process re-engineering. The manual operations practices in place at most organizations aren't sufficient for the self-service vision of cloud computing. Application groups will clamor for the immediate resource availability associated with the public cloud providers, and will expect internal IT operations to respond as quickly. That's challenge number one.