Richard Villars joined us for a recent webcast on paths to the cloud. This post shares a few of his insights.

In this new digital world we are communicating with our customers 24 hours a day on various devices. We are collecting more information about them. We’re analyzing that data to make faster and more effective business decisions.

How do you transform your business to operate in a digital model? Companies who will succeed and thrive in this digital world are those who leverage their technology, their people, and their intellectual property, including their data, to own the customer experience.

What the cloud journey is about is developing an environment that is agile enough, flexible enough, and scalable enough, to be the foundation for delivering the best customer experience.

Today there are very few companies that only use one type of cloud solution, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform (PaaS), or Infrastructure, whether private or public Already 70% of enterprises IDC surveyed recently use more than one type of cloud.

Unless an organization is a startup, it will be using all these different options I have to because I have acquired different services over time. So, hybrid cloud rules the day and is gaining in adoption. However, hybrid is more of an unplanned situation rather than a strategy. CIOs are getting lost in their clouds.

Many companies turn to clouds to become more agile, flexible, and scalable. Beyond systems of record, these are systems of trust. Does adding cloud capabilities result in real business gains? You never want to have to deal with a migration or upgrade ever again, reducing the costs and risks of keeping the systems running, so cloud is appealing.

However, there is a problem – The Three Cloud Problem. It is not about SaaS, Platform, and Infrastructure. It is about meeting evolving business needs in ways that are controlled, simple to manage, and secure.

The three clouds that we are talking about are:

• Steady-state clouds that serve as or interact with systems of record
• Elastic clouds that are designed to scale both up and down for peak engagement, analytics, and data consolidation periods
• Local clouds, an emerging kind of cloud, a standardized set of private hardware and software resources deployed on premises to serve a local set of users and their needs for responsiveness, availability, and government compliance. This is not the same as what some vendors would call a private cloud or data center. It’s about the local users, not the data center.

The problem is, what do you need to do to connect these three clouds? You need:

• Data control through one model, one set of services
• Agile network connectivity to link and move data between these clouds
• Control over application assets including data management

So, what does all this mean for you?

First, you need a diversified portfolio of cloud services that your company can depend upon.

Second, you will be managing a growing range of assets – physical assets, data assets, and application assets that reside in multiple data centers. You need to manage the movement and the flow of data between those assets. Having good partner management relationships for those third-party data centers is critical.

Finally, the real hybrid story is about the people. Your internal IT organizations need to work effectively with a range of external service providers – SaaS providers, hosting service providers and their staff to provide coherent global services. The biggest task is to work effectively across organizations as well as within your organization.