Hybrid clouds are king confirms IBM research

Seventy-eight percent of companies say their cloud initiatives are co-ordinated or fully integrated, compared to just 34 percent in 2012, according to IBM research.

At the same time, nearly half of workloads – 45 percent – are expected to remain on-premise with dedicated servers.

“Enterprises are moving to the cloud, especially hybrid cloud, faster than anyone expected to support their digital transformation, drive business model innovation and fuel growth,” said Marie Wieck, IBM.

“As clients continue to reap the benefits of integrating their on-premises infrastructure with the cloud, we see them increasing their investments in new workloads on public clouds. Successful clients have integrated plans to place workloads where they fit best.

The IBM study, “Tailoring hybrid cloud: Designing the right mix for innovation, efficiency and growth,” is based on in-person interviews and surveys of more than 1,000 C-suite executives from 18 industries.

Conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), the study finds that the top reasons executives cite for adopting hybrid cloud solutions are: lowering total cost of ownership (54 percent), facilitating innovation (42 percent), enhancing operational efficiencies (42 percent) and enabling them to more readily meet customer expectations (40 percent).

Companies undertaking cloud initiatives found they allowed them to expand into new industries (76 percent), create new revenue sources (71 percent) and create and support new business models (69 percent).

The study also reveals the top three challenges to cloud adoption, which are perceived security or compliance risks and requirements (47 percent), cost structure in terms of capex versus opex considerations (41 percent), and increased risk of operational disruption due to new cloud-based solutions (38 percent).

@AntonySavvas