Last week, we discussed a recent article by Data Center Knowledge, quoting a survey finding that “…70 percent of respondents were using or evaluating a hybrid cloud solution.” Hybrid cloud approaches have been a big focus of our blog for a while – and we’ve discussed many reasons and benefits behind the infrastructure strategy and technologies. We are excited to see that hybrid cloud is winning the attention of IT executives, as we find it to be a technology very worthy of consideration.
But let’s look a level deeper. It’s one thing for IT executives and business leaders to be highly considering hybrid cloud – but to actually pull the trigger and open up their checkbook? That’s a whole other issue.
Much to our delight, research firm IDC released an incredible assessment of the Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Market – according to its Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, total IT infrastructure spending dedicated to the cloud continues to occupy nearly 30 percent of budgets, up from 26.4 percent last year. Further, public cloud revenue boomed this year, increasing 25.5 percent (to $3.9 billion), and private cloud revenue increased 24.4 percent (to $2.4 billion). Server, storage, and Ethernet switch revenue for public and private cloud systems grew by 25.1 percent year over year to nearly $6.3 billion in the first quarter of 2015.
NetworkWorld covered this remarkable research and made a great point, correlating the data – non-cloud IT infrastructure increased only by 6.1 percent, and that’s mostly because of non-cloud server sales. Storage sales actually declined. The tides are certainly turning.
Kuba Stolarski, Research Manager, Server, Virtualization and Workload Research at IDC, noted that since private and public cloud infrastructures are growing at breakneck similar speeds, it truly shows the shift in end users clearly becoming very open to hybrid deployment scenarios to modernize their IT infrastructures.
It makes sense – hybrid approaches are structured in a way that fits many different business goals and scenarios. Gone are the days where businesses need to overspend on infrastructure equipment or create a data center from scratch. Rather than planning ahead for what ultimately becomes unused resources, not to mention the time and attention of your IT staff, hybrid cloud steps in and simplifies, efficiently utilizing only the resources and costs needed to fit bandwidth, capacity and budget requirements.
It’s great to see that hybrid is moving beyond the nice-to-have or hype features – it is truly beginning to occupy the budgets of companies that realize it is the most efficient and customized way to optimize IT infrastructure. We look forward to watching that attention and spend increase from here, for business’ sake.
