While many in the industry view cloud as a fundamentally separate landscape with its own rules and requirements, the data behind this report would indicate that the cloud mosaic continues to tie back into traditional, non-cloud and even non-virtual infrastructures. The goal suggested by this research would be to find increasingly better ways to optimize the heterogeneous whole, or in other words the "ecosystem" of cloud service providers (CSPs), other service providers, and internal cloud deployments within a single IT organization. In many verticals, these ecosystems are broadened to include partners and suppliers with roots going back well before cloud meant something other than "wide area network."

Ecosystem Cloud: Managing and Optimizing Cloud Across the Full Cloud Mosaic is research dedicated to looking at this very phenomenon across verticals and company sizes in 2013.