2016 was the year hybrid cloud arrived in the mainstream as many organizations sought to dip their toes and explore the potential benefits. With the beginning of the year now out of the way, results have begun to pour in on motives, anticipation, and vision towards the future.
The latest insights into where hybrid cloud is headed can be found in the 2016 IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study, titled “Tailoring Hybrid Cloud” and surveyed over 1,000 global respondents from 18 different industries. Nearly two-thirds of respondents were in leadership roles and held the power of the purse in making cloud decisions.
The data on this report is fairly extensive. We took a look and came back with the following takeaways:
- Cutting Costs is a Real Choice: 54% of respondents to the survey indicated that reducing the total cost of technology ownership was top of mind. Hybrid cloud reduces technology costs by compromising on technology refreshes and moving some assets to off-premises data centers which enables scalability, financial flexibility, and guaranteed uptime.
- Cloud is a Driver of Innovation: Cloud itself is innovative, but as an infrastructure asset causes innovation for the companies who adopt. Notably, cloud also provides organizations the ability to fail fast and realize what doesn’t work in a fast-moving market. In IBM’s survey, nearly 90% of executives surveyed indicated that their most successful cloud initiatives had already significantly expanded into new industries and created new revenue streams.
- Old However, is Still Good: Despite the warmness to cloud, there’s still an attachment to on-premises technology and rightly so. Many technologies simply don’t have a place in the cloud provided security and migration challenges. Nonetheless, each organization’s needs are important, even as research firm IDC projects public cloud services to grow to $195 billion dollars in 2020.
- Cloud Doesn’t Change the Customer Focus: The warmness to cloud also doesn’t change the focus on the customer, as the survey found that service applications were mostly to be moved in the next two years. Cloud actually accelerates time to market and updates to software don’t impact the customer experience as a whole, meaning that organizations can focus on what they do well instead of managing technology.
What do you think of the report? Are there any takeaways you think will influence the way hybrid cloud is adopted over the next few years?
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