Frost & Sullivan: 80 percent of IT leaders prioritize hybrid cloud strategies

CLOUD is an integral part of every enterprise leader’s IT playbook.

The technology is popular across all industries as it offers unprecedented flexibility and affordability. Organizations can use it to scale services according to their respective needs, on a pay-per-use basis.

Three types of cloud services are currently available: public, private and hybrid.

Often, enterprises find that ‘going hybrid’, which provides them with an integrated environment of several public and private cloud platforms, can best cater to their organizations’ various needs.

It brings about a host of benefits, such as cost-effectiveness, as organizations can opt to store less sensitive information on the cheaper public cloud; and also flexibility, as organizations have the freedom to deploy apps and services in whichever platforms they run best at.

The use of hybrid clouds is gaining traction. According to a report by Frost and Sullivan, up to 80 percent of IT leaders recognize that the implementation of a hybrid cloud strategy is crucial to maintain a competitive edge in their industry.

Unfortunately, many hybrid cloud strategies never make it past the drawing board since deploying hybrid clouds at scale comes with its own unique challenges, such as.

# 1 || Employees lack cloud experience

A hybrid cloud environment is not the same as a traditional data center: different talents and skillsets are required to enable its smooth operation.

Many organizations fall short when it comes to having in-house experts that are knowledgeable in cloud-specific tasks, such as optimizing its infrastructure and handling software-defined management platforms.

Up to 67 percent of IT leaders acknowledged the lack of in-house cloud expertise, with another 59 percent voicing a difficulty to hire and retain the right talent.

# 2 | Inconsistency of app performance

Migrating to the cloud is difficult but companies need to make sure they move with all of their apps.

Some of these are simple to move to the cloud, however, others, especially those that need to access data in a mixed environment often struggle to deliver on performance expectations without the right specialists to support the app.

Ideally, a team should constantly look out for bugs and security risks in apps that are moved to the cloud, and then rectify these issues by installing updates and patches.

This is a major hurdle in most organizations. Up to 67 percent of IT leaders acknowledge that this skill force is severely lacking, and that poor app performance is a stumbling block in their migration to a hybrid environment.

# 3 | Complexity in managing multiple vendors

Most organizations engage the use of multiple vendors when it comes to managing their hybrid cloud environment.

However, each vendor brings along with them different service contracts, licenses, and service level agreements (SLAs), all of which have to be managed separately.

Not only do organizations have to integrate the technologies, but they also need to work independently with a myriad of vendors to identify, isolate, and fix problems, should a glitch occur.

Moving forward, organizations must first recognize that they should not adopt the hybrid cloud just because everyone else is doing it.

They ought to first evaluate the needs of their organization. Should they decide that hybrid is ‘the way to go’, they must take the above into consideration, and develop appropriate strategies for implementation.

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