Sorry about the over-used headline. I felt compelled to use it just this once because it fits so well.

Cloud is no longer just hype. It is real, and a main focus of many IT organizations for next year.

With 1500 CIOs in attendance, the Gartner Symposium was a major indicator about the adoption of cloud. One industry insider attending the conference told me, "Every company I've talked with is looking to at least put their non-essential apps with cloud providers asap. As time goes on they'll consider their more critical apps if possible."

Novell's recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive in October backs this up, reporting that cloud adoption is much higher than previously thought.

"Fully 77 percent of survey respondents report using some form of cloud computing today, and 95 percent count cloud computing in their future plans; both figures are much higher than previously reported, and the same percentage also report plans to increase cloud computing use. Once considered a niche application, it is clear from these results that cloud computing has penetrated the mainstream and is now firmly embedded in the majority of enterprise IT arsenals, not just for today but for tomorrow as well."

Other interesting survey results:

- 34 percent of survey respondents are using a mixed approach of private and public cloud computing, with 43 percent planning to increase their use of the combined approach.

- 87 percent of respondents believe public cloud computing adoption will occur alongside of, instead of replacing, company-owned data centers, with 92 percent indicating an increase in public cloud use as current IT platforms are replaced.

- 31 percent of respondents find that a key benefit to private cloud computing is the ability to manage a heterogeneous infrastructure.

The survey also indicates something I have discussed previously in BSMdigest: private cloud computing is emerging as the consensus choice for enterprises.

"An impressive 93 percent of respondents agree that private cloud computing platforms offer a management framework that can span the heterogeneous infrastructures that are increasingly prevalent in today's enterprise data centers. 89 percent of the survey respondents agree that private clouds are the next logical step for organizations already implementing virtualization. And almost everyone (93 percent) also agrees that adoption of private cloud computing is increasing."

This is, of course, important news for Business Service Management, which goes hand-in-hand with private cloud -- an idea supported by several articles appearing in the December issue of BSMdigest, including 11 BSM Predictions for 2011 and BSMdigest's exclusive interview with Zyrion CEO Vikas Aggarwal.