Two years ago, I spoke to 80 people in the IT department of an energy company who all clearly viewed the cloud as a threat. Midway through, their CIO stood up and said, “Don’t waste energy worrying about working for a cloud provider, focus on how to make them work for you.”

2014 will be the year of the hybrid cloud.

Although trust has grown gradually, with many internal IT organizations viewing cloud vendors skeptically, most CIOs now recognize that cloud options are viable alternatives to internal IT for many of their application workloads.

IT teams that embrace the opportunities in this liberating insight will be able to stop fearing for their jobs and recognize that the cloud is not a cataclysmic shift in their environment but rather another tool to meet the information needs of their companies.

CIOs will increasingly decide how to sort their application portfolio, identifying the…