Let me start by saying every customer that I have talked to in the past 12 months says – that they will be going with a hybrid approach – combination of public and private clouds. The following are few things to think about before you decide on how you want to proceed.

- Type of enterprise – if you are a Web-based business, then public cloud is a no brainer. Regulated industries like insurance and now financial services will have a tougher time to go only w/ public clouds. So you might start with a VMware-based private cloud offering and then as you decide to use or expose APIs/services to customers/partners or your compute cycles for a point project are exponentially high, you might opt for adding the public cloud to your strategy.

- Use case – what you are doing will define how you do it. If the data is very sensitive and cannot leave the firewall, then you might decide to start with the private cloud. Just remember that is what people said about sales/forecast data. Salesforce.com is thousands of customers and their data seems pretty secure. Nevertheless, security of the data will be important criteria in deciding the private vs. public discussion.

- Cloud provider type – self services (l EC2, Google) or high touch (Rackspace, Sunguard, etc.). This is mostly about how you would like to access services. High touch has its benefits, but is also expensive. Over a LONG period of time the lines will blur, but at least for the next decade the difference in approach will be stark.

- Control – this goes back to the use case discussion above. Enterprises will want visibility and control. Granular control on things like authentication, authorization, data masking, etc. As with much of the Web/cloud approach, it has to be simple and has got to scale.

Now for the controversial part. Much has been said about the Google outage. Recently blogged about it here. Rob Enderle recently used the Google outage to assert that private cloud models will win over public cloud models. Even though he makes good points, it is not what our customers are telling us.. This is not an either or discussion. Enterprise customers will do both.

We also see that control – and the perception that you are giving up some of it – is a central factor in cloud adoption. Now all of sudden you have clients writing code to your services that don’t work for you, with good intentions but maybe some occasional bad code. Or… you’re using lots of these services and have no idea what data is moving in and out of your company. I think we’re starting to see progress in a few cases. A lot of the CTOs I speak to are already addressing control – and some elements of customization and policy enforcement up front at the same time that they are addressing other factors like reliability and security. We’re already starting to see these companies on the bleeding edge of the cloud address control.