There is plenty of attention on the public cloud phenomenon, and no shortage of discussion on whether enterprises will adopt outside cloud services to supplement or replace their own internal IT. But even more pervasive these days is the growth of “private clouds,” in which back-end IT applications and infrastructures are virtualized and abstracted to a common service layer that the entire organization can use.

Here at the Perspectives community, Darren Cunningham, vice president of Marketing for Informatica Cloud, recently posted a compelling piece exploring the implications of cloud and Software as a Service on IT departments, observing that contrary to rumors of IT being dismantled or shunned aside as cloud computing grows, we’ll see new avenues of growth. IT will truly evolve to consultants and partners to the business, because in the coming years, the business will rely even more on IT, not less.

Of course, there will understandably be some levels of angst as technology shifts to the cloud. The distress is obvious for businesses moving to third-party providers, but will also crop up for what will be far more common internal cloud migrations.

Such was the recent experience at EMC Corporation, which has embarked on an ambitious course of eating its own dog food and moving its internal IT operations to an internal cloud. Being a technology vendor with lots of technology-savvy professionals, it would seem that EMC would have had a fairly smooth migration. But still, there were people issues that needed to be addressed as the process moved along, admitted Chuck Hollis, global marketing CTO for EMC.

As the company moved from the pilot stage to implementation stage for moving core mission-critical applications to cloud, Hollis said at a recent conference, IT got very nervous.  The move involved management changes and the transformation of IT jobs. Older technology had to be decommissioned, and new relationships introduced. This was the “scariest” phase for IT, he said. However, there was no change in IT staffing levels as the process moved forward, and, if anything, there was an increase in the perception of IT staffers as key advisers to the business.

What is the best way for an enterprise to move to private cloud?  EMC published a white paper outlining its own strategy, which involves three phases:

Build the foundation: Reach out to technology practitioners in the IT organization to share information on basic cloud-enabling technologies.  “It is critical that IT practitioners learn and understand the impact of applying virtualization…  It is also critical for IT practitioners to look beyond individual pieces of the technology and look toward an integrated view of how the various components work together.”

Accelerate change: Bring the private cloud discussion to people focused on delivering IT services to the business. These discussions should focus on “leveraging new technologies to better meet key performance indicators used to measure IT effectiveness,” and “making organizational and process changes.” Changes in technology can provide only limited benefits to businesses unless accompanied by process and organizational changes, the paper notes. At this stage, new IT metrics and service delivery models may be identified and developed.

Focus on service management: “Business units may not understand the advantages of migrating to a private-cloud based IT infrastructure beyond IT cost reduction,” the paper observes. It’s critical at this stage to educate the business leadership on how cloud-based services can help grow the business. Benefits include reducing the cycle time for businesses through self-service IT, introducing new services and providing better end-user experiences.