Public cloud adoption gets mixed reviews. Some report enterprise IT as being hesitant to put their mission-critical applications - and data - in a public cloud environment, and others say the prospect of fast, easy services managed by a provider is appealing to many.

For instance, a recent article "Is the cloud really ready for prime time?" cited Gartner as saying the public cloud is used primarily for development and testing functions for about half of clients, while the other half uses it for miscellaneous applications. A separate article quotes recent research from IDC and points to firms in Singapore and their preference for public over private cloud. And Andi Mann, vice president of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, penned an entire blog on the reasons the public cloud to date is a failure.

"Large enterprises continue to embrace private clouds. IT organizations increasingly understand the risks, opportunities, roles and potential benefits of public and private cloud computing. And they're largely putting their chips on the private cloud card," Mann's blog reads.

While private cloud offers the security many in enterprise IT want, the prospect of creating the private cloud environment from scratch might be overwhelming to already resource-constrained IT shops. And while public cloud provides immediate access to services and resources, the lack of control some platforms offer lessens the appeal for enterprise IT. It would appear that enterprise IT would like the ease of the public cloud with the security and reliability of a private cloud environment.

Striking this balance is what cloud services provider DNSEurope wants to do for its clients. The company allows customers to "get their feet wet" with their public cloud offerings and experience the potential benefits the cloud can offer their businesses. If the customer wants to migrate its public cloud environment into a private cloud, DNSEurope can also help with that.

 "If you look at a public cloud service provider like Amazon, they have a wonderful infrastructure and control with APIs that allow what you can do on their platform. But ultimately they are a public cloud service provider," says Stephen Hurford, Cloud Services Director at DNSEurope in a recent CA Technologies Cloud Luminaries video. "They don't have an upsell into private clouds. So, it's a little of a developmental dead-end if you go to a public cloud service provider like that."

DNSEurope uses the CA AppLogic platform and can transition customers from the managed offering to an in-house environment with the same technology. Hurford says he understands customers' desire to manage their own cloud environments as well as their hesitancy to go all-in without some proven results.

"They're testing that platform on a managed public environment with us, and then when they gain confidence or when their business scales to a certain level, we can easily, literally with a one-line command, migrate them from a public cloud to their own private cloud. And then they have control of the infrastructure," Hurford explains. "For us, that's more about being master of your own domain rather than living with the API capabilities of another public cloud service provider."

What type of cloud best suits your business needs? Does a migration from a public cloud environment to your own private cloud make sense to you? Please leave a comment here, let me know via Twitter @DDubie or e-mail me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.