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Hybrid cloud enables digital business

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 21 Jan 2016
Hybrid cloud is today's best infrastructure for digital business, says EMC.
Hybrid cloud is today's best infrastructure for digital business, says EMC.

Digital transformation and the use of hybrid cloud are key to competitive success in the digital age.

This is according to a recent study by IDG Research Services, commissioned by EMC, which says hybrid cloud is the great enabler of digital business.

The report found that digital transformation enabled by hybrid cloud helps organisations increase IT agility and makes implementing digital business initiatives a faster, easier and less expensive process.

Companies that adopt hybrid cloud are three times more likely to approach business and infrastructure readiness goals, says IDG Research.

Gartner predicts nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

Peter Cutts, vice president, cloud solutions at EMC, says hybrid cloud is today's best infrastructure for digital business.

"It has the necessary underlying characteristics for keeping pace in a fast-changing digital economy: speed, flexibility, reliability, scalability, cost-effectiveness. And it enables digital business in specific ways."

Digital business is high on corporate agendas (90% of respondents to the global IDG survey count it among their top business priorities) and, therefore, high on the agendas of CIOs and IT organisations, adds Cutts.

According to IDC, digitisation and transformation to virtualised, on-demand provider-based services are driving very rapid internal IT change.

IT buyers are shifting steadily toward cloud-also and cloud-first strategies, and nearly all are reconsidering their IT best practices to embrace hybrid cloud construction and operations, it says.

IT shops are making real progress toward implementing the appropriate infrastructure to support a modern, digital business, says John Gallant, senior vice president and chief content officer at IDG Enterprise.

However, Gallant believes there's still a good deal of work to be done.

IT remains too siloed, and some companies are not moving quickly enough to bridge the worlds of private cloud and public cloud capabilities, he continues.

Gallant believes such issues hinder enterprises from bringing their digital business aspirations to life more swiftly.

Hybrid cloud is the answer to such challenges, he says, adding "hybrid cloud is the great enabler of digital business".

Necessity is driving the need to work around hybrid cloud and companies are now looking at ways to optimise this, says Lise Hagen, research manager IT services and software at IDC.

"The good news is that organisations and providers have realised that for them to reach scale, they need to be in the cloud, she says.

The only way for business to do digital delivery is ultimately through a combination of private and public cloud, says IDG Research.

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