Do the Knowledge ... Pierce the Cloud

To become a licensed Hackney Carriage operator (aka Black cabs) in London, you have to "do the knowledge." This can take 3 to 4 years of memorizing hundreds of routes, streets and points of interest. These cabbies have picked us up and taken us where we want to go sans maps, GPS or navigation systems since the 17^th century. There's been a lot of banter lately regarding private clouds versus public clouds. No company of any significant size can move its IT infrastructure to the cloud all at once. You need a plan. And considering policies such as identity management, backup/DR, directory synchronization outside & behind firewalls, IT organizations will not escape paying the price to learn the architecture of cloud computing. Most companies I talk to are attracted to the upfront cost savings but still need a comprehensive strategy for cloud & SaaS scenarios. This becomes especially important when you want to bring your applications & services in-house at a future date. You need to "do the knowledge" of the technology stack because you will still need to integrate both premise and off-premise IT systems. I don't believe there are "private clouds," that was a data center as I recall, why invent more jargon?