Today's applications are very likely to stay where they are as long as they "pull their weight" and continue to provide cost-effective, reliable solutions. Organizations are building their own internal "Clouds" through the use of Webbased access mechanisms now to incrementally move to a more generalized, more flexible, more agile environment.

External Clouds or mesh computing certainly looks appealing for some applications, such as personal productivity or group collaborative applications. Organizations will experiment with them and determine for themselves when and if to deploy them for their own application portfolio.

Since the use of external services and clouds needs to prove itself before business or mission critical solutions will be hosted in the cloud, it is almost a certainty that organizations are going to move into a hybrid environment that uses the best of both worlds.

This paper presents the following topics:

• The different roles suppliers and customers play
• The "Golden Rules" customer's IT organizations typically follow
• A review of what "cloud computing" is and how some suppliers are expecting organizations to ignore the golden rules
• Highlight an approach to take advantage of the best that "Cloud", "Mesh", or "Elastic Cloud" computing offers while still not abandoning the investment in other approaches and technology