As the end of 2014 approaches rapidly, I keep thinking about an article I read recently which highlighted findings from a survey on hybrid cloud knowledge and what it means for the industry – and for my clients embarking on cloud strategies this year and next. 2014 has certainly been marked as the year where the hybrid cloud became “real.” Our industry has gone beyond reading about it and talking about it in theory as now many companies have put it into place, analyzed the results and formed best practices.
While it may have become real this year, the reality is that there are companies and IT executives out there that still don’t understand what it means for them and their infrastructure. The article that I reference above appeared in Forbes, written by a smart contributor, Joe McKendrick (you can follow him on Twitter here); and his title says it all: Everybody Is Hot On Hybrid Cloud, Even If They Don't Quite Understand What It Is. The article points out a lot of the factors that we at Markley have understood as reasons for our clients to get into hybrid – and why it’s a hypothetically perfect scenario for most companies:
Running an internal data center is costly and difficult
Public clouds don’t offer any control
Hybrid is the perfect mix of public and private – and offers a happy medium for executives nervous to go in either direction
The article goes on to share findings from a recent survey, conducted by Avanade, that finds that most executives know they want hybrid, but still don’t even really know what it is. Avanade surveyed 1,000 business and IT leaders and the take-away that McKendrick pointed to, and that stayed with me, is that “few executives actually fully understand hybrid cloud’s potential — only 16 percent of respondents are able to identify the full range of benefits afforded by hybrid solutions.” It seems like there is confusion about what it all means and what it takes to be successful.
Some other key findings include:
Companies are investing in hybrid cloud solutions at a faster rate than private or public cloud, with 69 percent of companies agreeing that implementing a hybrid cloud strategy will be one of their biggest areas of focus in 2015.
Despite clear agreement that hybrid cloud adoption should be a priority, 58 percent of companies currently do not have a hybrid cloud strategy in place.
Companies overwhelmingly agree that hybrid cloud will enable their organizations to focus on issues which are core to the growth of the business (74 percent).
Most companies are not yet developing applications to truly leverage cloud-native capabilities. 71 percent of companies are simply using cloud infrastructure to run existing applications, which means that they’re not realizing the speed, scale and efficiency that cloud solutions offer.
It’s clear that executives need more instruction and resources to understand and realize the potential of hybrid cloud, so this brings me to one of my resolutions for 2015: let’s commit to more education and knowledge on the topic so that we as an industry can take hybrid cloud deployments to the next level.
Our team is dedicated to providing our clients with the advice and strategic counsel on how to interface between colocation and the cloud. We are happy to help you as well – feel free to reach out to our team at sales@markleycloud.com – or continue to check back on this blog where we will continue to provide the opinions, analysis, current events and strategic best practices that will help us achieve the best versions of hybrid cloud in 2015.
