IEEE Cloud 2014 is just days away, and this week TechNavio has been rolling out the results of our Hybrid Cloud Survey.
To generate the survey results, we polled 100 influencers in the Global Cloud Market, in order to understand the current hybrid cloud computing landscape, as well as where the market (which is growing at a CAGR of 30.16 percent from 2013-2018) is heading in the future. Survey respondents included directors, managers, consultants and specialists from a range of companies operating in the cloud market.
Based on these results, TechNavio has compiled a list of the benefits of hybrid cloud, as well as a few reasons why companies aren’t jumping on the bandwagon just yet.
Cost Savings
Virtualization seeks to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and accelerate value for businesses. Adopting hybrid cloud enables IT organizations to segregate the costs of hardware and software purchases, and the costs of using cloud services for specific tasks such as backup, archiving, and disaster recovery. Increased adoption of hybrid cloud enables organizations to reduce costs for maintenance, upgrading, patching, and other functions of the IT department.
Improved Productivity
Virtual environments like hybrid cloud allow organizations to put workloads and data wherever required to help improve their overall efficiency and extend their business opportunities. Enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud because it combines public cloud, private cloud, and dedicated servers, delivering a common architecture to create the best results for a range of business needs. In addition, virtualization of the network infrastructure increases its productivity considerably, and the hybrid cloud uses a virtualized computing resource infrastructure to cater to the business requirements of enterprises, thus driving higher organizational productivity.
Security Benefits
Hybrid cloud can be considered a step up on both private and public cloud, since it offers the security of private cloud couples with the cost benefits delivered by the public cloud. The private cloud elements allow enterprises to keep control of their critical data and applications, which is especially beneficial for public sector organizations and enterprises subject to strict security and regulatory policies. Security concerns and fear of data breaches or loss are encouraging IT enterprises to opt to move their workload to the hybrid cloud, helping to control the access to critical applications.
While all these pros present a strong case for adopting a hybrid cloud structure, according to our survey respondents, businesses are still approaching this new model with some wariness.
Security concerns are by far the major reason why organizations are not jumping head first in to the hybrid cloud pool, with 62 percent of survey respondents citing this as a reason why an organization might not adopt hybrid cloud.
This was followed by worries that hybrid cloud wouldn’t meet business requirements, stringent government regulations and high cost as other reasons that organizations might not adopt the solution.
50% of the companies interviewed said that there is also some worry they might lose the ability to fully capitalise on the benefits of public and private clouds if they adopt hybrid cloud for their business requirements.
Additionally, a lack of trained employees, reliable infrastructure and disaster recovery and lack of knowledge and capability to deploy cloud are other major roadblocks stopping wider adoption of these solutions, according to survey respondents.
Clearly, hybrid cloud still has some ground to cover to be readily accepted in the corporate culture, and fully implemented.
To view the full results of the TechNavio hybrid cloud survey, click here.
