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.
Yugal Joshi states that Everest Group’s research indicates that 77% of enterprises are actively pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy, with one in three migrating their production workloads to the cloud. Enterprises can protect its existing investments and leverage best-of-breed cloud services to drive business value. And the hybrid model . . . provides the needed level of security, elasticity, and application-aligned infrastructure better than a ‘one size fits all’ ecosystem.