Many consider cloud computing a revolution in how we do computing. However, we could find we’re falling back into very familiar and unproductive patterns.

Although clouds can become more effective and efficient ways of using applications, computing, and storage, many clouds are becoming just another set of silos that the enterprises must deal with. But it does not have to be that way — if you learn to recognize the pattern.

Right now, getting help when something unusual goes wrong is a frustrating experience for customers. They’ve come to stereotype the experience as waiting endlessly on hold, deciphering strangely cheerful foreign accents, humoring technicians who are incapable of understanding — let alone answering — their questions, and taking time off to wait for a tech who doesn’t show.

Few IT duties are as universal as the care and feeding of the corporate desktop. While other aspects of IT get easier thanks to new technologies like server virtualization, there’s still no magic pill to alleviate the day-to-day drudgery of maintaining and securing hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of desktop systems.

The drawbacks of desktops go beyond the burdens of management and maintenance. They involve employee mobility, client hardware refreshes, data security, and, under certain conditions, even power consumption and cooling.

With the rising interest in private cloud computing, many public cloud providers are moving to service offerings that promise reserved portions of clouds they are calling reserved instances or sometime virtual private clouds. This is a step in the right direction, considering that many enterprises and government agencies are pushing back on public clouds. This is more around control issues than any legitimate technical arguments.

There will be internal (private) and external (public) clouds that you will have to deal with, but they are so much more complicated than the traditional terms — LAN, WAN, intranet, and extranet — can describe. For one, the term cloud denotes a fuzziness about where the application bits and data are hosted. This is not only because of the business requirement for fault-tolerance and performance (which means the application servers and data are usually hosted at multiple locations), but also because virtualization is becoming almost an essential component of cloud computing.