IT industry analyst firm Gartner forecasts that IT organizations will invest more into private clouds, rather than public cloud services over the next three years, despite economies of scale promised by the public clouds offered by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

"Larger enterprises will continue to have an IT organization that manages and deploys IT resources internally, some of which will be 'private clouds,'" Gartner analyst Tom Bittman said in a statement. "IT organizations will also take on IT service sourcing responsibility, determining when to leverage external providers, when to deploy internally, and when to leverage both for specific services."

Over time, the industry will evolve to deploying combinations of private clouds and public cloud resources "in a hybrid manner," Gartner predicted. As public cloud offerings mature, private clouds will be required for many large enterprises for many years.

"Many of the investments in private cloud computing will prepare the enterprise for public cloud computing," Bittman said. "These investments are not just technology changes - they are also process, cultural and business interface changes. Making these changes sooner rather than later will help enterprises to take better cloud sourcing decisions and potentially make for an easier transition to public cloud computing."

Bittman recommended that top IT and operations managers follow the following plan over the next 12 months, if they are considering the nature of their organizations' relationships with the cloud into the near future:

Now
- Experiment with the cloud and discover where it is already taking place in the enterprise
- Lead a cross-organization cloud initiative

Next 90 Days
- Use virtualization as a catalyst to drive IT modernization
- Portfolio your services
- Develop strategies for services and private cloud
- Identify new opportunities for the enterprise that are emerging due to cloud computing

Next 12 Months
- Develop an overall cloud computing strategy
- Build a dynamic sourcing organization