It’s always nice to hear the stories about a company’s entire IT infrastructure journey, and what may have changed along the way. These stories of shifting cloud adoption trends and plans are useful for anyone on a similar IT path. For the state of Kansas, private cloud initially seemed like the best fit. Costs quickly grew, though, from an estimated $33 million to $50 million. The missing piece in getting return on that investment was mapping out how the state would get customers to use the platform. That’s a good reminder to take into account the cloud cost/benefit ratio, and think pretty far ahead before you adopt. Kansas is now planning to use hybrid cloud instead.

The Gap Inc.’s cloud journey also started with private cloud, but the retail company is now moving some workloads to public cloud. They’ll build OpenStack private clouds in-house to get new features for its existing in-house cloud environment. That adds to three existing clouds in-house that will be migrated, bringing up a likely new term in IT: the legacy cloud. That on-premises cloud infrastructure runs much of the back-end for Gap and makes a lot more cost sense than using public cloud for those workloads, especially since it emulates the flexibility and scalability of public cloud.

The recent Red Hat conference saw a lot of intriguing speakers and talks about how open source continues to be an important part of cloud adoption trends. One session on hybrid cloud mentioned some of the dangers of blindly starting to use cloud without that longer-term planning. Cloud can easily be more expensive than planned, and it takes planning and management to use cloud resources wisely. One missing piece today: public cloud needs more unique services.

And on that front, a product just released this week is a framework designed to provide connections among clouds and their users. The product, from Console Connect, is described as the first mesh network for multi-cloud deployments. It initiates dedicated network connections in order to bypass public internet connections, with the aim of avoiding the inefficient traditional legacy connectivity model. This could have big implications for any businesses using public cloud today, since the lack of integration can be a huge hurdle. Successful multi-cloud would allow businesses to move workloads more easily for better disaster recovery and business continuity outcomes.

Till next week, plan carefully for your cloud adoption future.