
By now nearly every organization has taken advantage of cloud computing in some form or other—Infrastructure as as Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Countless studies have shown that the business benefits of cloud are just too significant to pass up.
That said, few organizations are prepared to adopt a “cloud only” approach. In many cases that’s because they continue to derive the maximum return from their systems already in place, on-premise or hosted. As a result, organizations today often operate mixed environments incorporating public and private clouds along with core systems of record like ERP. According to a recent Harvard Business Review study, 63% of organizations are now pursuing such a “hybrid IT” approach.
So what, exactly, are the main advantages of a hybrid IT model, which often combines core ERP systems of record with cloud solutions of engagement? The upshot: While hybrid IT may be taking center stage at many companies today, it’s doing so for a number of different reasons.
A recurring refrain is that changing customer expectations and new business processes and systems call for more flexibility from IT.
“Our research indicates that 77% of enterprises are actively pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy, with one in three migrating their production workloads to the cloud,” said Yugal Joshi, Practice Director at Everest Group.