There is no single strategy or journey to the cloud that describes the experience of all or even most organizations’ adoption path, and trying to glean a single approach from all of the adoption patterns leads to poorly aligned expectations. We identified five common profiles of firms using hosted private cloud today: 1) hosting customers seeking improvements; 2) disaster recovery (DR) specialists; 3) external cloud first-timers; 4) internal private cloud realists; and 5) public-cloud-first firms expanding into private. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals should identify which of these five hosted private cloud profiles maps their use case, and follow the corresponding best practices for that profile.