Enterprises undergoing digital transformation (DX) require cloud efficiencies to reinvent themselves as data-driven businesses. Yet many IT departments are realizing that getting their DX initiatives across the finish line requires also fine-tuning their cloud-first strategies.
Many are embarking on newer cloud-smart approaches that match each workload to the private cloud or public cloud service best suited to it for optimal cost, performance, security and other factors. What constitutes the “best” cloud environment can change with time, as pricing, regulation, application maturity and other variables fluctuate, requiring continual infrastructure monitoring and adjustment.
By some estimates, 82 percent of enterprises are embracing flexible hybrid cloud infrastructures to gain the dynamic advantages of both environments. At the same time, 64 percent of IT executives polled by Gartner in 2021 said IT talent shortages are the biggest adoption barrier to such emerging technologies, up from just 4 percent one year earlier.
Clearly, enterprises need assistance bringing their hybrid cloud and DX initiatives to fruition. These requirements spell opportunity for IT solutions providers in the areas of advisory services, cloud abstraction tools, and unified management platforms.
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Article: Why Hybrid Cloud Means Big Opportunities for You
The Hybrid Cloud Payoff
Gartner predicts that by 2027, 85% of the workload placements made until 2022 will no longer be optimal, due to changing requirements. This situation can be costly: a highly publicized 2021 report from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz estimated that for companies operating at scale, the cost of using public cloud is conservatively two to three times as much as maintaining private infrastructure.
While the immediate IT resource availability of public clouds make them ideal for initially getting new applications and services up and running quickly, these cost realities have helped drive the movement of mature applications off public cloud services and onto private infrastructure over time, as their behaviors become well-understood.
The blended, hybrid cloud supports this dynamic movement of DX applications and workloads, and it pays to accelerate adoption. According to research from technology analyst firm Valoir, companies further along with their DX initiatives, scoring 8 or higher on a DX completion scale of 1 to 10, had roughly twice the revenue growth rate of those scoring a 3 or lower.
Partnering for Success
Solutions partners have a lucrative role to play in enterprise transformation success. They’re positioned to supply the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), container technology, and cloud abstraction platforms businesses need to dynamically see, manage, move, and secure IT resources across dissimilar cloud platforms.
Third-party expertise and automation tools, such as the Hitachi Vantara cloud-agnostic hybrid cloud platform, help enterprises navigate these unfamiliar waters. Partners can build businesses on top of these platforms for meeting the individual infrastructure modernization and transformational requirements of each customer. In doing so, they can help enterprises accelerate their hybrid cloud-based DX deployments and derive value from their initiatives as quickly as possible.
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