It's well to keep in mind that many enterprises are investing (and have invested) in private clouds. They like the architecture, but aren't prepared to put their data and processes on the public cloud.
Phil Wainewright is right when he says that private clouds need to be open to public clouds, in a hybrid environment. Isolation is not a choice. And companies need to communicate with their customers, contractors, and suppliers -- using a public or semi-private (a private cloud with invited users from outside the company)cloud.
This means the big issue for 2012 will be interoperability -- being able to move data and workloads from one cloud to another. Some standards are required to help customers move from isolated private clouds to taking advantage of everything they need in the cloud network.
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