Cloud Computing Boosts Hybrid Cloud Adoption: Study

Source – cxotoday.com

Cloud computing is completely changing the way enterprises see and approach IT. The shift can be traced to SaaS applications and has now found prominence in data centers with a larger focus on hybrid cloud initiatives.

A latest study by Evaluator Group survey of enterprise IT administrators found that 62 percent are of the opinion that a hybrid cloud infrastructure is in their long-term future and 58 percent believe they would increase their hybrid cloud workload in 2017.

John Webster, an Evaluator Group senior partner is of the view that hybrid cloud is mainly an IT architecture that integrates on-premises computing resources with off-premises public cloud resources. “This includes multi-cloud architectures,” he said.

According to Webster, disaster recovery (DR) is the most common hybrid cloud use cases among traditional enterprise users. “Upwards of 80 percent in our survey research,” he noted. Hybrid architectures enable enterprises to spin-up DR sites on-demand. Although the hybrid cloud calls for enterprises to examine an area that is for many organizations a completely new data center concept, the results, particularly in DR, are generally worth the initial cost of the effort.

“DR has long been a lagging capability because of cost, complexity, and availability of resources,” Webster states. “Hybrid cloud removes some of those barriers to adoption.”

Webster said that the hybrid cloud is defined as the end state for a lot of enterprise IT organizations. “In some cases, it is a way station between moving all IT resources to public clouds and the eventual shut-down of on-premises data centers,” he noted.

The technology’s long-term stance is not very clear. “The thinking at the moment among many enterprise users is that there will always be some percentage of their applications that will remain on-premises and will, therefore, be ‘hybridized’,” said Webster. “However, that assumes that the degree of difficulty in supporting [applications] is manageable and the costs for doing so are reasonable.”