Hybrid Cloud – What we can learn from the IBM Growing Up Hybrid report

Key Finding #1: There’s more than one reason to pursue hybrid cloud

The ability to improve IT productivity by offloading resources and management complexity to the cloud is often named as one of the foremost reasons organizations choose to pursue hybrid cloud. While the IBM survey found that participants did indeed name this as their most important goal for adopting hybrid cloud, it’s also significant that it wasn’t the only goal.

A close second to increasing productivity was the ability to increase security and mitigate risk, while cutting costs and scaling to handle dynamic workloads were also important to a significant number of organizations. The lesson here is that there’s more than one way to benefit from hybrid cloud, so organizations that focus on only one benefit will be selling themselves short.

Key Finding #2: Leading organizations recognize that nothing can match hybrid

In order to understand how different organizations approach hybrid cloud differently, the report divided up survey respondents based on their hybrid cloud management maturity, as well as their ability to drive competitive advantage through hybrid cloud. Those organizations that ranked themselves highly in both of these regards were considered Frontrunners; those with the lowest levels of success were considered Chasers, while those in between the two extremes were considered Challengers.

Perhaps one of the greatest insights about hybrid cloud Frontrunners is the fact that the vast majority of them told surveyors they would not have been able to achieve the same level of success with any other kind of IT environment. Nine out of 10 Frontrunners said that their hybrid cloud environment provided a greater return on investment than either an all-traditional or all-cloud IT environment could.

Key Finding #3: Hybrid cloud leaders make the most of both old and new

For many IT leaders, moving to hybrid cloud can seem like a scary proposition, due primarily to the fact that they assume costly infrastructure investments will be needed just to enjoy many of the benefits hybrid offers.

The survey results show that this was not the case among hybrid cloud Frontrunners. While these organizations experienced better results than other organizations across the board, the one area where they really shined was in their ability to maximize the value of their existing traditional infrastructure. Frontrunners were nearly twice as likely to do this as Chasers. This shows that far from requiring you to throw out the old and start over from scratch, hybrid cloud is among the best ways to breathe new life into the systems you already own.

Key Finding #4: Leaders use hybrid cloud to grow and get better

With all the positive results Frontrunners are achieving with hybrid cloud, it would be easy to understand if they were to simply sit back and enjoy what they’ve already achieved. Instead, the opposite has proved true: leading organizations are using hybrid cloud to promote change, growth and innovation.

According to the survey results, Frontrunners were twice as likely to use hybrid cloud to support product and service innovation as Chasers were, and also four times as likely to launch new digital services using hybrid cloud. Clearly, hybrid cloud adoption can drive benefits both now and into the future.

Learn more

To find out more about the insights included in the report, download and read the full report today.

Also, if you're interested in learning what the optimum hybrid cloud environment for your business might look like, contact Cima to schedule your free RightCloud hybrid cloud assessment workshop.

Schedule your RightCloud workshop today

Thanks for reading.

Jim