Cloud computing has taken the world by storm. It’s driving new infrastructure models across enterprises — both under the direct management of IT organizations as well as under rogue cloud adoption outside of the control of IT. But when addressing the changing application workload requirements of the decade-long digital transformation wave, cloud coexists with traditional infrastructure. Technology leaders are engaged in the task of optimizing application workloads across a balance of hybrid platforms (including public cloud, private cloud, and traditional) based on individual requirements.
n January 2022, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the importance of hybrid cloud in supporting growing and increasingly complex application workloads as part of digital transformation. To explore this topic, Forrester conducted a survey of 503 global IT and infrastructure and operations decision-makers from companies in various regions and industry sectors around the world. The research revealed that most organizations are taking a modern, hybrid approach to meet the individual demands of their application workloads and matching those specialized demands with cloud (both public and private) as well as traditional platforms. And for about three-quarters of firms, hybrid is their long-term
strategy to support their digital transformation priorities.
Forrester recommends that as organizations continue their transformation journeys, it is imperative that they do four things: 1) prepare for a hybrid cloud future, 2) optimize infrastructure choices to meet digital demands,3) focus on effective application workload orchestration, and 4) commit to continuous change and improvement
Key Findings
Current application workloads within organizations are fairly evenly split across public cloud, private cloud, and traditional infrastructure environments. However, on average, only 21% of surveyed IT leaders said they are fully confident in the ability of their organization’s current infrastructure to support growing
application workload requirements.
In total, 45% of respondents said their organization is adopting either modernization in place or a hybrid
modernization approach. Compare that to 15% who said their organization uses lift-and-shift to the cloud (i.e., moving an application and its data without redesigning the app), and 15% who said their organization is building internally from scratch.
No individual infrastructure option meets the needs of all application workloads. All survey respondents said their organizations experience similar challenges with internal expertise, portability, and cost/value.
The top desired attributes for deciding where to deploy application workloads are performance, security, open/industry standard, and flexibility.
Surveyed IT leaders view hybrid cloud as an end state, not a milestone. They are embracing true hybrid strategies to boost their confidence in supporting their organizations’ primary application workloads on any platform while also ensuring they have portability to switch between platforms as needed.
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