Strategic hybrid cloud in enterprise IT to improve performance and data regulation

More organizations support hybrid and multi-cloud environments as both workers and workloads expand to more locations. Bring-your-own-device policies enable workers to access corporate applications and services from multiple places and platforms, and modern development tools decouple apps and services from the infrastructure that they run on, allowing flexible movement according to business needs. IT departments have adopted a variety of infrastructures and platforms on corporate premises and the cloud to accommodate these changes, creating the corporate hybrid cloud. Simultaneously, businesses are evaluating their infrastructure needs more critically and making more strategic choices among the available options, sometimes using multiple public cloud providers, or a multi-cloud environment.

Frost & Sullivan’s latest white paper, Leveraging Strategic Hybrid Cloud in Enterprise IT, discusses how current knowledge gaps in cloud technologies open opportunities for new services, tips for gaining stakeholder support, and hybrid and multi-cloud best practices for enterprises.

Frost & Sullivan’s 2021 research finds that 41% of businesses globally have implemented a hybrid cloud, while 36% use a multicloud environment. Some businesses use a hybrid cloud platform to introduce visibility, control, advanced data protection and security, and analytics. Others, however, struggle to manage their assets in a complete environment. Moreover, many organizations can’t get to the ideal hybrid scenario because of complexity, team structures, or organizational challenges, such as difficulty in holistically managing policies, enforcement, and security across vendors.

“Broad, comprehensive enterprise digital transformation introduces new business risks,” said Toph Whitmore, Frost & Sullivan Industry Director. “The to-be-managed enabling technology fabric now extends into the cloud and widens to encompass work-from-anywhere connectivity. IT leaders must balance organizational cloud aspiration with operational realities, a dichotomy that complicates security delivery, efficacy, and management. Securing hybrid- and multi-cloud environments can require IT leaders to integrate solutions to mitigate risk.”

Cloud migration unlocks organizational data value and allows access to modern services that provide softer benefits, like operational efficiencies or improved regulatory compliance. Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies can:

• Help against cloud lock-in to optimize costs continually.
• Enable rapid flexibility to gain tremendous value.
• Improve cost optimization, uptime, and governance.
• Mitigate security and compliance risk.
• Implement data protection strategies and optimize ROI.

Monty Bhatia, Vice President – Global Systems Integrator, VMWare, noted, “We hear it every day from our customers; enterprises run their businesses on multiple private and public clouds. The executives Frost and Sullivan spoke with during the Think Tank series underscore this reality and have great insights on how to best operate in a hybrid, multi-cloud world.”

CT Bureau