With the added flexibility it provides, congruently with cost reductions and the management simplification, Cloud adoption is accelerating among enterprises. The general trend is to rely increasingly on applications, operating systems, and additional software solutions as services served online rather than on-premise. Even mission-critical resources are transitioned to the Cloud because of inherent benefits related to scalability and the pay-for-what-you-use model. By 2012 market analysis firm IDC indicates that spending on Cloud services will grow to no less than $42 billion. In Microsoft's perspective no company will embrace the Cloud exclusively. Instead, the Redmond company indicates that hybrid strategies will be used, marriages of public and private Clouds.

“Very few companies will rely either 100 percent on public cloud providers or 100 percent on in-house infrastructure,” revealed Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of Infrastructure Server Marketing at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is working toward an integrated approach that bridges on-premises datacenters and the external cloud, which offers our customers the benefits of both approaches.”

Private Clouds imply the traditional approach of running applications and additional resources on on-site servers. Microsoft does provide enterprises with a range of resources that will enable them to build private Clouds, from virtualization, to server OSes and to automated management and utility-billing models. But what the company won't do is license Windows Azure for private Clouds. Microsoft's very on Cloud operating system will only be available on its datacenters, and will not be offered to any third parties. For on-premise deployments the software giant is pointing to solutions such as Windows Server, which is designed to stretch into the Cloud, and which will play nice with Windows Azure.

“Our goal is to give businesses the choice of running applications on-site, in the cloud or using a combination of the two,” Kelly added. “This hybrid model gives customers the best of both worlds — the scale and convenience of a public cloud and the control and reliability of on-premises software — and lets them move fluidly between the two based on their needs. It provides customers an on-ramp from their current IT environment to the cloud.”