If an inability to achieve low costs and high utilization rates means that cost competitiveness is not possible, pursue a strategy that offers both internal and external cloud hosting, with pricing transparency for both options. This allows the application group to decide whether a higher price for an internal cloud is acceptable, based on factors like local control and better SLAs, or that a lower price from an external provider that delivers less service is preferable.

One should not underestimate the challenges of this approach. It requires identification of true internal resource costs and chargeback capability. It also requires that application groups can make the deployment decision on the fly (after all, if making the decision requires a lengthy discussion and evaluation process, it's not cloud computing, it's just more of the traditional process).

One should also recognize the threat this poses to the internal capacity. If insufficient numbers of applications choose to host internally, the low utilization will require costs to be spread across fewer applications, thereby resulting in higher allocation costs to them, which results in it being more attractive for those applications to decamp to outside cloud resources. Frankly, there is no easy answer to this issue, but it will be significant for sure.

Overall, one can expect to see much more emphasis on increasing utilization rates in internal data centers, far beyond the levels achieved even by the best of today's virtualized environments. The sea change brought by cloud computing and its assumptions of "infinite" capacity and on-demand elasticity, accompanied by pay-per-use pricing, will galvanize change in IT infrastructure and operations far beyond what most envision today.

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm , which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of "Virtualization for Dummies," the best-selling book on virtualization to date.