It’s no secret that Covid-19 accelerated technological transformation. It propelled organisations of all sizes across the world to find new and innovative ways to keep themselves afloat. The pandemic impacted many other areas of work, life, and business,and it’s particularly clear when comparing research into Hybrid Cloud Adoption from 2020 to 2022.We looked at two research trend reports,both produced by 451 Research, now part of S&P Global. The first was commissioned by VMWare in 2020¹ and the second was commissioned by Cisco in 2022².
Comparing the reports by the same organisation (with potentially a very similar pool of respondents) shone a spotlight on how the fundamental approach to hybrid cloud shifted in a very short period. But then, we all experienced this in our work and personal lives; the once-in-century pandemic accelerated technological transformation. What this looks like (in research terms) is the number of organisations choosing a hybrid position has increased from 57% to 82%, and while data security remains a top concern, it is has also become a top driver for cloud adoption.
As a by-product of increased adoption, the reality of hybrid cloud has set in, with a substantial increase in operational complexity and a shift from cost savings to cost optimisation and cost/benefit approach. This has not stopped most organisations from taking on these complexities and overhauling their operational strategies to extend their datacentres and benefit from the performance, security and speed of cloud-native technology.
While only 57% of respondents in the 2020 research claimed they were moving towards a hybrid position, the 2022 research found that a substantial 82% of respondents were using a cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for at least some of their workloads.
The 2022 research delved deeper into how and why cloud is being adopted and found that workloads most likely to be supported by hybrid cloud models are backup / disaster recovery (73%) and application development (70%). In addition, only 8% of respondents claimed to use a single public IaaS cloud provider. The rest use multiple public cloud providers, and cited the reasons as; managing security, agility and scalability; benefiting from best-of-breed cloud services and applications; and finally, supporting business agility and innovation.
More than a decade ago public cloud was hailed as the destination for all workloads, and while this has not come to pass, organisations have embraced public cloud to extend the datacentre, accelerate opportunities and scale quickly when demand spikes. This hybrid position is without a doubt the new norm, with organisations combining on-premises and multiple clouds to shore up their security, speed up application development, and boost business agility.
Data security remains the biggest concern, but there has been a drop from 42% to 37% of respondents quoting this challenge. This drop suggests an industry that has found holistic and creative solutions to use hybrid cloud for data segmentation and isolation, benefit from the flexibility to keep some workloads on-premises and using different regions for data residency. However, this dovetails into two other major concerns: in 2020 respondents said that costs and then complexity were barriers to cloud adoption (30% and 25% respectively). In 2022 these two factors are in joint second place with 33% of respondents saying these are significant challenges they face as organisations.
Complexity challenges are up by 8 percentage points - managing the complexities of a hybrid position with multiple clouds is a sobering reality, despite the abundance of tools designed to simplify cloud management. This has led to the increased adoption of cloud-based IT operations platforms delivered as-as-service (94%).
Cost challenges are up by 3 percentage points - the industry has moved from an expectation of cost-savings in the cloud to a cost / benefit and cost optimisation approach because saving money in the cloud is simply not guaranteed. The increased complexity, for starters, raises operating costs. And so, as the understanding of the cloud’s value in greater agility and scalability becomes apparent, expectations have started to shift from cost reduction to cost management.
What solutions are being put in place? The 2022 survey found that most respondents (57%) are focussing on creating a Cloud Centre of Excellence to ensure that their cloud strategy successfully meets their business objectives. They have also opted for a cost / benefit approach (53%) and adopted an AIOps operating model (53%). Finally, they have centralised CloudOps and NetOps functions (50%) and developed a multi-cloud networking strategy (50%).
In 2020 the business case for moving towards a hybrid position centred around speed-to-market and agility (35%); scalability and resources on demand (34%); and reducing the internal owned / managed datacentre footprint (33%).
The business requirements that were driving the strategy towards cloud adoption in 2022 were led by performance (45%), security (44%) and speed (39%).
Currently, It seems that agility, speed-to-market, scalability, and resources on-demand remain important. Security has become a a push / pull factor, acting as both a concern and a driver. However the focus on reducing the datacentre footprint is no longer a top priority as hybrid solidifies its place as the cornerstone and norm.
The 2022 research concludes with 451 Research stating,“Coordination between NetOps, CloudOps, and DevOps functions is essential for hybrid cloud success. It reinforces the need for centralised platforms that provide visibility,orchestration, and automation across teams, tools, and environments.”
IT are shaping strategy - as developers become more influential in organisations, they are helping to define cloud strategy. The 2022 research found that respondents within specifically DevOps and CloudOps roles say that organisational development processes and tools are changing. They are being driven by a cloud-first approach to new applications (33%) and influenced by cost optimisation (19%) and automation (18%).
Legacy applications - the approach to legacy applications is confident, with only 8% of those surveyed saying that they will retain business-critical legacy workloads as they are, opting instead for modernising them in place (38%) or refactoring and shifting them (25%). Almost all (98%) say they have or will refactor applications using cloud-native technology.
Collaboration is key - collaboration between NetOps, CloudOps, and DevOps teams is not only beneficial but critical with respondents citing numerous benefits. More than half (55%) say they’ve created cross-functional teams with technical and business representation. The vast majority (62%) meet on a weekly basis and say that benefits include improved security (45%), increased operational efficiency (41%) and enhanced cloud application performance (39%).
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