While businesses of all sizes in all geographies view hybrid cloud adoption as a priority, there is much confusion about what exactly hybrid cloud means and what is required to prepare an organisation for implementation.
That's according to global survey results released by Avanade, a business technology, cloud and managed services provider. The study included 1 000 global C-level executives, business unit leaders and IT decision-makers in 21 countries, including SA.
The survey discovered companies predict that more than half of their applications and services will be deployed on the hybrid cloud within an average of three years.
Market analyst firm Gartner indicates 72% of companies will pursue a hybrid cloud strategy this year, with rival IDC saying more than 65% of enterprise IT organisations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT organisations.
Understanding the benefits
Avanade discovered few companies fully understand hybrid cloud's potential. According to its research, only 16% of respondents are able to identify the full range of benefits afforded by hybrid solutions.
These benefits include the ability to integrate private and public clouds, place workloads in the cloud type of best fit, share workload on multiple public clouds, and scale up or down as needed.
It also found that despite clear agreement that hybrid cloud adoption should be a priority, 58% of companies currently do not have a hybrid cloud strategy in place.
Most companies are not yet developing applications to truly leverage cloud-native capabilities, says Avanade. Some 71% of companies are simply using the cloud infrastructure to run existing applications, which means they are not realising the speed, scale and efficiency that cloud solutions offer, the firm says.
Some 53% of companies identified security and privacy issues - real and perceived - as top concerns to hybrid cloud implementation, yet 60% admit public cloud solutions are more secure than they were three years ago.
Meanwhile, Avanade's study shows companies around the world expect hybrid cloud solutions to give them an edge over competitors in the field.
"Hybrid cloud gives companies the speed and flexibility they need to transform into digital businesses and enables them to focus on driving growth and outperforming their competitors," says Peter Drube, country manager at Avanade SA.
"Budgets and control may be shifting away from IT, but hybrid cloud solutions represent an opportunity for IT to align itself with C-suite priorities, delivering strategic value to the business in a secure and properly governed manner."
Hybrid enterprise
Karl Campbell, regional vice-president of UK and SA at Riverbed Technology, notes hybrid cloud is when both private and public clouds are used by an organisation to deliver applications and store data among other uses.
"It can form part of the hybrid enterprise, but the hybrid enterprise refers to an organisation that uses a mix of on-premises and cloud/SaaS apps that use MPLS [multiprotocol label switching] and public Internet connections. The data and applications are located in a combination of data centres, branch offices and the cloud," he explains.
According to Campbell, it's impossible to put every application in the cloud, nor would organisations want to, as budget constraints, technical limitations, security concerns and performance issues can all be valid barriers to doing so.
"This is where the hybrid enterprise fits in. The hybrid enterprise uses a mix of data centre with private and public cloud-hosted apps and data, as well as networks that are made up of high-quality virtual private networks and supplemented by Internet connectivity. It is this type of IT environment that is becoming ever more relevant."
Mark Ridley, regional director for Africa at NetApp, says hybrid cloud environments provide a way to leverage the advantages of the cloud while maintaining on-premises infrastructure for the most critical processes or most sensitive data.
"The potential benefits of a hybrid strategy are clear - more cost-effective computing capacity and on-demand flexibility, among them. Organisations can also rely on the cloud for their disaster recovery strategy," Ridley concludes.
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