This was the case with one group of mid- to large-sized corporate customers of one cloud-led software vendor surveyed.

In a survey of 79 large and midsized organizations in North/Central/South America (54%), Europe and the Middle East (36%) and the Asia Pacific region (10%) using a specific vendor’s hybrid cloud software, 77% of IT decision makers and infrastructure owners polled had plans to operate their businesses in hybrid cloud environments.

The survey data shows that organizations in the global survey were using hybrid cloud strategy to accelerate their digital transformation and deliver business value faster. 

Other findings from the survey centered on enterprise hybrid cloud adoption are:  

  • More than 75% of respondents said their organization planned to operate a hybrid cloud environment for the foreseeable future.
  • 17% of respondents expected their organization to eventually migrate all IT to the Cloud.
  • The most important business benefits of hybrid cloud adoption were ranked: 
    • Faster innovation – 26%  
    • Increased responsiveness to customers – 25% 
    • Increased collaboration – 22% 
  • 27% of respondents indicated they were looking to improve infrastructure flexibility and scale
  • Nearly 21% of respondents indicated they needed to optimize costs
  • 13% of respondents indicated that they needed to improve data accessibility
  • Data protection (including disaster recovery, backup and archiving) was the most popular hybrid cloud use case, with 29% of respondents stating they were either utilizing hybrid cloud for data protection today or planned to do so within 24 months.
  • Respondents indicated they were also leveraging hybrid cloud for production use cases more than anticipated: 20% indicated they were currently integrating both on-premises and cloud resources to support the same workload for hybrid production, with 17% planning to do so within 24 months. 

Said Ronen Schwartz, General Manager and Senior Vice President, Cloud Volumes, NetApp, the firm that commissioned the survey: “Speed is the new scale. IT leaders everywhere are accelerating digital transformation efforts, requiring more agility and flexibility to stay ahead of their competition and deliver immediate business impact. Enterprises are embracing hybrid cloud models to effectively scale out IT resources to support business-critical applications and workloads.”